Post by Purple Pain on Jan 21, 2019 14:15:41 GMT -6
Who remembers when/why the OT rules were changed the last time? Yeah, me neither...
With both conference championships going into OT yesterday (and the many OT games this season), is it time to take a look at the OT rules? Should there be special rules for the playoffs or all or nothing?
Some things to get the discussion started:
Probably Reignman 's view:
More in-depth stuff here:
Since the overtime rule change in 2012, the team that possesses the ball first in OT wins exactly 50% of game by grotkal
Link: old.reddit.com/r/nfl/comments/aic4gt/since_the_overtime_rule_change_in_2012_the_team/
With both conference championships going into OT yesterday (and the many OT games this season), is it time to take a look at the OT rules? Should there be special rules for the playoffs or all or nothing?
Some things to get the discussion started:
Probably Reignman 's view:
More in-depth stuff here:
Since the overtime rule change in 2012, the team that possesses the ball first in OT wins exactly 50% of game by grotkal
Based on the discussions from yesterday's games, there has been a lot of calls to change the current overtime rules. However, the numbers being thrown around on the first team possessing the ball winning (52%, 60%, etc), and thus the game being "decided on a coin flip" have been based on a longer time period that includes previous OT rules (notably the old sudden death, where a FG won regardless of possession). I wanted to check the numbers on OT results under the current rules (TD on first possession ends the game, FG only wins AFTER the first possession). I used the game logs on www.pro-football-reference.com to do this mini-analysis. Apologies if I missed any games, but if I missed 1 or 2 it shouldn't wildly change the numbers. It turns out there are a fair amount of OT games every year.
The current rule was first implemented in the 2010 playoffs, but was extended to regular season games in 2012. Under these rules, there have been a total of 118 overtime games. This includes regular season and playoffs, and includes yesterday's games.
Wins by team that possesses the ball first: 59 (50%)
Of these wins, 23 were on an opening drive TD (39.0% of team with first possession wins, 19.5% overall overtime games)
Wins by team that possesses the ball second: 52 (44.1%)
Ties: 7 (5.9%)
Taking all of this information together, it would seem to suggest that the current NFL rules are actually fairly balanced in terms of giving teams an equal shot to win. The opening drive TD, while not allowing the other team the ball, makes up for two small advantages for the second team to possess the ball. First, they know that they have 4 downs to move the ball if there is a FG on the first possession. Second, they can just kick a FG and win on their first possession, while the first possessor should always try for a TD (potentially leading to turnovers that may not happen if they could just kick a FG to win). Opening drive TDs have also ended less than 20% of overtime games, which means that in over 80% of overtime games, both teams had a shot with the ball (or it wasn't necessary due to a pick 6, or something like that).
The remaining advantage for the team with the first possession is that they are likely to have more possessions than the other side in OT due to getting the ball first and OT having a time limit. This potentially gives an extra opportunity to the team with the first possession. Ties are more likely to hurt the team with the second possession, since they'll sometimes have one fewer possession, but we can't say that all 7 ties would have been victories for those teams getting the ball second.
What do you think? Could improvements be made to the current rules that still maintain this balance? It's unclear how the win totals would change if a first drive TD didn't end the game. It seems likely that the team scoring the TD would still win most of those games, but it would give a big advantage to the team with the second possession of knowing they had 4 downs to move the ball the whole way down the field, while the first team has to decide between kicking a FG and going for it on 4th down. This would potentially swing the pendulum back in the favor of the defending team and likely doesn't improve on the results enough to warrant the extra length of games/chance of injuries. (The injury point was one of the major reasons why overtime was shortened from 15 minutes to 10 minutes.)
An important note -- I make no attempt to weight results by the quality of the teams, home/away, etc. I took a purely agnostic approach (sort of a "these two teams were tied after 60 minutes, so they're basically equal today" approach).
EDIT: Because someone was arguing that playoff games are different from regular season and so I shouldn't include ties (I honestly don't know what the argument is on why ties should be omitted, but whatever), I omitted playoff games and looked solely at the regular season. Note that there are 8 playoff games and 7 have been won by the team with the first possession (5 by opening drive TDs). Definitely not a big enough sample size to say anything there, but we can look at the regular season games alone:
Regular Season (110 OT games):
Wins by team that possesses the ball first: 52 (47.3%)
Of these wins, 18 were on an opening drive TD (34.6% of team with first possession wins, 16.4% overall overtime games)
Wins by team that possesses the ball second: 51 (46.4%)
Ties: 7 (6.4%)
(excuse the rounding error adding up to 100.1%)
The current rule was first implemented in the 2010 playoffs, but was extended to regular season games in 2012. Under these rules, there have been a total of 118 overtime games. This includes regular season and playoffs, and includes yesterday's games.
Wins by team that possesses the ball first: 59 (50%)
Of these wins, 23 were on an opening drive TD (39.0% of team with first possession wins, 19.5% overall overtime games)
Wins by team that possesses the ball second: 52 (44.1%)
Ties: 7 (5.9%)
Taking all of this information together, it would seem to suggest that the current NFL rules are actually fairly balanced in terms of giving teams an equal shot to win. The opening drive TD, while not allowing the other team the ball, makes up for two small advantages for the second team to possess the ball. First, they know that they have 4 downs to move the ball if there is a FG on the first possession. Second, they can just kick a FG and win on their first possession, while the first possessor should always try for a TD (potentially leading to turnovers that may not happen if they could just kick a FG to win). Opening drive TDs have also ended less than 20% of overtime games, which means that in over 80% of overtime games, both teams had a shot with the ball (or it wasn't necessary due to a pick 6, or something like that).
The remaining advantage for the team with the first possession is that they are likely to have more possessions than the other side in OT due to getting the ball first and OT having a time limit. This potentially gives an extra opportunity to the team with the first possession. Ties are more likely to hurt the team with the second possession, since they'll sometimes have one fewer possession, but we can't say that all 7 ties would have been victories for those teams getting the ball second.
What do you think? Could improvements be made to the current rules that still maintain this balance? It's unclear how the win totals would change if a first drive TD didn't end the game. It seems likely that the team scoring the TD would still win most of those games, but it would give a big advantage to the team with the second possession of knowing they had 4 downs to move the ball the whole way down the field, while the first team has to decide between kicking a FG and going for it on 4th down. This would potentially swing the pendulum back in the favor of the defending team and likely doesn't improve on the results enough to warrant the extra length of games/chance of injuries. (The injury point was one of the major reasons why overtime was shortened from 15 minutes to 10 minutes.)
An important note -- I make no attempt to weight results by the quality of the teams, home/away, etc. I took a purely agnostic approach (sort of a "these two teams were tied after 60 minutes, so they're basically equal today" approach).
EDIT: Because someone was arguing that playoff games are different from regular season and so I shouldn't include ties (I honestly don't know what the argument is on why ties should be omitted, but whatever), I omitted playoff games and looked solely at the regular season. Note that there are 8 playoff games and 7 have been won by the team with the first possession (5 by opening drive TDs). Definitely not a big enough sample size to say anything there, but we can look at the regular season games alone:
Regular Season (110 OT games):
Wins by team that possesses the ball first: 52 (47.3%)
Of these wins, 18 were on an opening drive TD (34.6% of team with first possession wins, 16.4% overall overtime games)
Wins by team that possesses the ball second: 51 (46.4%)
Ties: 7 (6.4%)
(excuse the rounding error adding up to 100.1%)