Overtime proposal shows short-week concerns no longer move the needle
League shrunk OT to 10 minutes in 2017 to preserve/protect Thursday Night Football.
admin
In 2017, when the NFL was still trying to reconcile short-week football with player health and safety, the league reduced regular-season overtime to 10 minutes. Eight years later, a proposal from the Eagles would return the overtime duration to 15 minutes.
Although it's not an official proposal from the Competition Committee, it's on the docket for a vote at the upcoming annual meeting. The Eagles have suggested both a 15-minute extra session and the fairly new postseason overtime approach, which guarantees a possession for each team.
It remains to be seen whether the proposal gets any traction. Most coaches would prefer the overtime rules to be the same for the regular season and the playoffs. (Of course, the rules will never be identical, given the possibility of regular-season ties.)
Guaranteeing a possession for both teams makes a 10-minute overtime impractical. One team could consume most of the time with a methodical touchdown drive, leaving the other team without a fair chance to match the score.
The fact that any mention of pushing regular-season overtime from 10 minutes back to 15 wasn't immediately dismissed shows how much things have changed regarding the effort to justify the Sunday-Thursday turnaround. In 2017, the league was very sensitive to any and all criticism of short-week football. Indeed, the change from 15 minutes to 10 happened because the Buccaneers played nearly a full 15 minutes of overtime on a Sunday against the Raiders before playing on a Thursday night against the Falcons.
Now, it's likely that most won't even mention the fact that the overtime proposal entails turning the clock back to the possibility of a team playing up to 75 minutes on a Sunday and up to 75 minutes on a Thursday. That's two and a half games, with only three days off in between.
Bottom line? The ship has sailed regarding any and all pushback to short-week football. Once the NFL tripped over the somewhat disingenuous and incomplete notion that the injury rate for games played on the Thursday after a Sunday is no different from the injury rate for games played on the Sunday after a Sunday, the debate ended.
The Thursday night cash cow was given permanent status. The pig kept getting fatter. And the hog continues to stave off slaughter.
