Positing a new NFL overtime method
Four hours and six minutes into a Super Bowl that felt like it might never end, the guy who caught the pass that ended it did not realize that it had ended.
As you’re likely aware, the Kansas City Chiefs won it when Patrick Mahomes flipped a 3-yard pass to Mecole Hardman in the San Francisco 49ers end zone in overtime, generating a direct quote from the quarterback that was unprecedented in the entire rhetorical history of Super Bowl Sunday:
“I threw a touchdown to this dude to end the game, and he looked at me,” Mahomes said. “He had no idea. I said, ‘Dude, we just won the Super Bowl.’ He had no idea. He didn’t even celebrate at the beginning.” Dude, where’s my confetti? Yeah, this is a week ago now, but I’m afraid it’s one of those teachable moments. And yeah, I know, you hate teachable moments.
In the bitter aftermath, several of the 49ers admitted that Hardman was not alone in not realizing the game was over because he didn’t know the rules of postseason overtime. They didn’t either, and defensive lineman Arik Armstead even said he only learned them through a Jumbotron explainer during the commercials prior to overtime.
But the real surprise in all of this is the widespread surprise with which it was met. Professional athletes might be complex bundles of highly admirable traits — talent, speed, strength, toughness, resilience, adaptability, even prescience — but they are not all that much for the rules.
This is generally a good thing because if the Super Bowl was played between the two teams that best understood the rules, you’d be looking at Gene Steratore’s raging arbitrators against Bill Vinovich’s fighting adjudicators. Or something.
I asked a former big league manager this week what percentage of baseball players know the infield fly
rule. He put it at 50%.
I’d say that’s charitable. Most of the reason these games have rules in the first place is because athletes too often can’t function within their sport’s agreed-to parameters. In the NFL, you still have players lining up in the neutral zone 100 years or so after someone first said, “Hey, you’re offsides!” which makes it a hard game to govern once the players are actually, you know, in motion.
I would posit that the majority of NFL defensive backs could not explain to you what constitutes pass interference, except to say that it’s nothing they do, never mind that almost every one of them is doing it on almost every play.
In the NBA, the failing effort to prevent players from traveling (that’s moving with the ball without dribbling it for you young’uns) is now so spectacularly hopeless that the rule itself has metastasized to 484 words across eight sections and five subsections.
And onward it spasms toward its only logical conclusion, which is, obviously, the hell with it; we’re not enforcing this.
The NFL is in no danger of muddying the overtime rules to that extent, but its direction is similar. Once, in a galaxy far, far away, a tie was a tie, and it wasn’t uncommon for a team to have two or three, even four in a season. Sudden-death overtime was next, but teams who didn’t get the ball complained loudly enough to gain a possession, unless the first team scored a touchdown. Then, in January 2022, the Chiefs beat the Bills 42-36 in a postseason overtime game in which the Bills didn’t get the ball, and suddenly, the postseason overtime rules were different than the regular season overtime rules.
So this, too, is headed for an obvious conclusion. At least to me.
New rule: In all instances, postseason, regular season, preseason, rabbit season — the team that wins the overtime coin toss wins the game.
You’re welcome.