The 2022 NFL Playoffs Proved One Thing: Don't Change The Overtime Rules

The NFL Playoffs have proven a lot of different things to me this year. First thing, is that playoff football can be fucking awesome to watch. QAaron Rodgers choking in the playoffs again, Matt Stafford making his first Super Bowl in his first year out of Detroit (LOL Detroit), the Bengals improbable run from just being happy to get their first playoff win in over 30 years to now being a win away from their first Lombardi Trophy, and let's not forget the absolute fucking instant classic between the Bills and the Chiefs, football never fails to make me fall in love again despite the NFL's best efforts. Speaking of the Chiefs, while their super bowl hopes were destroyed thanks to a well blended mix of Joe Shiesty and Andy Reid regressing back to his days without Patrick Mahomes as his QB with this level of choking, they did bring into a light an extremely controversial topic in the NFL over the last couple years, the NFL rules regarding overtime.

What's the issue at hand here? Well for those of you reading this who have only ever lived under a fucking rock, first off, how the hell did you get here, but to help you out a bit, here's what happened.

 After the aforementioned Bills vs Chiefs game people were very upset with the fact that the Chiefs won the coin toss in overtime and scored a touchdown on their first drive to win the game, meaning Josh Allen never had a chance to get the ball and try to score. Now, certain people among the sports world claim that the only way to avenge teams that lose these overtime games is to completely copy the overtime rules for College Football so that we can get score lines like this forever.

Now I'm here to tell people that changing the NFL overtime rules to be the same rules as college football would be the wrong move. While the idea of a multi-overtime NFL playoff game sounds  amazing on the surface, I think that people aren't taking player safety into account. One good multi-overtime game doesn't do much for me when players are getting injured and fatigued during that game, then have the next game to be an absolute fucking STINKER because too many players are out or still recovering from the previous game and it's either a blow out or a slow moving and low scoring game, fuck that.

On top of this, I don't think it's that big of a deal that Josh Allen didn't get the ball back. This is professional football not college. If the Bills defense, who by the way finished the regular season as the #1 defense in the league and was specifically designed to STOP PATRICK MAHOMES, can't stop Patrick Mahomes, then why should you automatically get the ball back? Nothing should come easy in this league, you should be fighting like crazy to get your offense the ball back. Get a stop, force a field goal, force a turnover (like the Bengals did against the chiefs of all teams, wow what a concept) do ANYTHING you fucking can to get your offense the ball back, it's a team game after all.

Now that whole rant that I just went on isn't to say that the current overtime rules can't be improved upon. I think that the biggest issue right now is that current rules have far too much emphasis on the flip of a fucking coin. So what needs to happen is that you either make it so the coin doesn't mean as much, or just get rid of it entirely. The two proposals that I think could work in the league's favor and add some extra entertainment to the league are as follows (there's more than two proposals in the article that I linked but shut up about it). The first proposal is call the spot and choose rule, where the coin flip is still involved but not nearly as decisive. After the coin toss, the team that won it will choose a spot on the field to start and then the team that loses decides whether to go on offense or defense, and then standard overtime rules go from there. The second proposal is called the field goal gamble, which involves all skill and no coin. The home team gets to choose a spot on the field to kick a field goal, and then the away team decides who kicks the field goal. If the kicker of said team makes it, they get the ball to start overtime, if he misses then it's the other team's ball to start.

I understand the frustrations behind the overtime rules, really I do. If you were the Chiefs in 2018 against the Patriots, the Saints in 2019 against the Vikings, or the Bills this year, you're upset that you didn't get your shot. But switching to the college rules isn't the answer, the current rules are fine as they are, just a couple of tweaks here and there and baby, you're golden.