No NFL game should end with Peyton Manning or Aaron Rodgers standing idle on the sideline, looking like a spectator who might as well order a hot dog because a stupid overtime rule doesn’t allow him to touch the football.
Overtime in the NFL is broken.
Now is the time for the NFL to fix it, and the league meetings in Arizona next week will provide an opportunity to finally make overtime rules make common sense.
Too much of the outcome in overtime is left to pure, dumb luck.
“It puts a premium on the coin toss,” Manning told me in September, after he watched helplessly as Seattle scored the winning touchdown on the opening drive of overtime to beat the Broncos 26-20.
Two of the most compelling pro football games last season were the Super Bowl rematch between Denver and Seattle and the NFC championship game between Seattle and Green Bay that sent the Seahawks back to the Super Bowl.
The drama in both games was priceless, until the 25-cent ending.
Led on splendid touchdown drives by quarterback Russell Wilson after Seattle won the coin tosses before overtime, the Seahawks won both games. They beat the Broncos and Packers fair and square, by the current inane overtime rules. Good on Seattle. Bad on the NFL.
The problem? Rodgers and Manning never got a chance to get off the bench and play football in overtime.
That’s worse than unfair. In a sport whose revenue and massive popularity is driven by its television appeal, that’s bad TV.
In a league with annual revenues of more than $10 billion, the NFL conducts overtime with rules more appropriate for schoolboys on the sandlot who are in a hurry to decide the outcome before they get in trouble for being late to dinner.
Once upon a time, way back when linebackers were allowed to hurt quarterbacks, overtime was played to sudden death, which only led to the perception the NFL was bigger than life itself. After the NFC championship game in January 2010 saw Brett Favre and Minnesota get eliminated by a New Orleans field goal without ever touching the football in overtime, the league tweaked its tiebreaking procedure with a half-baked new rule that appeared to be made up during a two-martini lunch.
The goofy current OT rules allow the game to end if the team in possession of the football first scores a touchdown, but an asterisk in the rule book forces everybody to play on if it’s a field goal, whose three points are diminished in importance because we all know kickers aren’t real athletes. No fair rule is ever written with an asterisk.
“They changed the rules a little bit, but it doesn’t really change if you go down and score a touchdown,” Manning said after the loss to Seattle. The Broncos quarterback was accused of sour grapes at the time. To be fair, Manning only gave his honest opinion on the fairness of overtime.
You know what? The NFL should listen to Manning and readjust the OT rules again.
Yes, I do recall Tim Tebow led the Broncos to one of the most thrilling playoff victories in franchise history under the current rules.
Fans, however, pay their hard-earned money to watch QBs work. No game should end without Rodgers or Manning getting a shot to spin the ball and weave their magic.
As NFL owners embark on a working holiday in the Arizona desert, they will discuss rule changes, some of them as wild and wacky as the Indianapolis Colts’ proposal to make some touchdowns worth as many as nine points.
But Chicago wants to put a much saner and far simpler idea on the table: In overtime, each team gets possession of the football at least once, no matter what, even if there’s a touchdown scored on the opening drive.
That idea makes good sense. It also makes for great TV.
An NFL quarterback — whether he owns the Hall of Fame pedigree of Manning or the lucky-to-be-employed résumé of Mark Sanchez — deserves the chance to do more in overtime than eat popcorn.
Mark Kiszla: mkiszla@denverpost.com or
