The NFL’s Overtime Rule Is a Mess. Fix It or Scrap It.
Ask five fans how overtime works right now and you’ll get five different answers, two of which are just confidently wrong. That’s not a fan problem. That’s a league problem.
The rule’s been tweaked so many times trying to fix “one team never gets the ball” that it’s now genuinely harder to explain than the infield fly rule. If your league’s marquee rule needs a diagram to understand mid-game, something’s broken.
Fix it or scrap it. Just pick one.
How We Got Here: A Short, Chaotic History
Overtime in the NFL didn’t always exist. For decades, tied games just stayed tied. The league didn’t add a real overtime period until 1974, when it introduced sudden death: 15 minutes, first score of any kind wins, game over. Simple. Also, as it turned out, not that fair.
The problem was obvious once field goal kicking got more reliable: win the coin toss, drive 40 yards, kick a field goal, go home. The team that never touched the ball in overtime had essentially no chance to affect the outcome. Fans hated it. Analysts hated it. It took the league a while to actually do something about it.
The first real fix came in 2010 for the playoffs, then 2012 for the regular season: if the team that got the ball first only kicked a field goal, the other team got a possession too. A touchdown on the opening drive still ended it immediately, but the cheap, low-effort field-goal win got closed off.
Then came 2017, when the league trimmed the overtime period itself from 15 minutes down to 10, mostly for player safety reasons: fewer plays, fewer injuries, shorter Sundays.
The rule stayed roughly like that for years, and it was the postseason version of overtime that finally forced the league’s hand. In the 2022 AFC Divisional Round, the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Buffalo Bills in overtime 42-36, in a game where the Bills never got a chance to touch the ball. Josh Allen had just led one of the great shootouts in playoff history, and it ended with him standing on the sideline. The backlash was immediate and loud enough that it directly triggered a rule change: starting with the playoffs, both teams would be guaranteed a possession in overtime, touchdown or not.
That left the league with two different overtime rules, a fairer one for the playoffs and a less fair one for the regular season, which is its own kind of dumb. So in 2025, the NFL finally aligned them. Owners voted to establish uniform overtime rules for both regular season and playoff games, guaranteeing both teams a possession regardless of whether the first team scores a touchdown. There was even a proposal to stretch the overtime period back out to 15 minutes, but the league opted to keep it at 10 for the regular season.
How It Actually Works Now (2026)
Regular season:
- Coin toss, 10-minute period, three-minute intermission before it starts.
- Both teams get a chance to possess the ball, even if the first team scores a touchdown.
- The only way the first possession ends the game outright is a defensive score: a pick-six, a fumble return for a touchdown, or a safety.
- After both teams have had a possession, whoever has more points wins.
- If it’s still tied after 10 minutes, the game ends in a tie. There’s no second overtime in the regular season. This actually happened: the Packers and Cowboys tied 40-40 in Week 4 of the 2025 season.
- Each team gets two timeouts, and coaches can’t challenge plays. Only the replay official can trigger a review.
Playoffs:
- Same core format, but there’s no tie allowed. If the score is still even, the league just keeps playing extra periods until someone wins.
- There’s no full halftime between overtime periods if it goes past the first one, just a two-minute break. If a playoff game somehow reaches a fifth quarter of overtime, there’s another coin toss and it starts over like a new game.
That’s five rule regimes in about fifteen years: 1974, 2010/2012, 2017, the 2022-triggered playoff fix, and the 2025 unification. Every single change was a patch on top of the previous patch, aimed at the same underlying complaint: the coin toss matters too much.
Does the Coin Toss Still Matter Too Much?
Sort of. It’s much better than it was, but it isn’t nothing. Since 2011, teams that received the ball first in overtime won 56.8% of the time, under the old rules, before the 2025 fix applied league-wide. That’s not a coin flip, that’s a meaningful edge, and it’s the entire reason the league kept fiddling with this in the first place.
The 2025 change should shrink that number, since a touchdown on the opening drive no longer just ends things. But it doesn’t eliminate the advantage. The team that gets the ball first still knows exactly what it needs to do; the second team is always playing with the scoreboard already showing a number. That’s a real strategic and psychological difference, even if it’s smaller than it used to be.
There’s also the complexity cost. The current rule has different lengths for playoffs versus regular season, different tie rules, different overtime-period rules, and a scoring exception that only applies to defensive touchdowns. Compare that to something like the NFL’s own onside kick rule, which just says you can try one anytime you’re trailing. One sentence. Overtime should not require a flowchart.
Potential Fixes
If the league wants to actually solve this instead of patching it again in three years, here are the realistic options still on the table heading into 2026-27:
- Spot-and-choose. Borrowed from a proposal by former Colts executive Bill Polian and others: instead of a coin toss, one team picks the spot on the field where the ball starts, and the other team chooses whether to be on offense or defense from that spot. This removes randomness entirely and turns overtime into a genuine strategic decision, but it’s a bigger philosophical shift than the league has ever been willing to make.
- College-style alternating possessions. Start each team at the opponent’s 25-yard line, alternate possessions, sudden death once both teams have had an equal number of chances. It’s simple to explain and structurally fair, but it changes the fundamental shape of NFL football into something that looks more like college overtime, which a lot of purists don’t want.
- True guaranteed-possession sudden death. Drop the touchdown/field-goal distinction and the defensive-score exception entirely. Both teams always get exactly one possession, full stop, then sudden death. Fewer rules, fewer footnotes, easier to explain in one sentence.
- Leave it alone. The league now has an entire 2025 season of data under the unified rule — including that Packers-Cowboys tie in Week 4 — and didn’t touch overtime again at this year’s league meeting. That silence is itself the answer for now: no proposal made it to a vote, which suggests the competition committee is comfortable letting the sample size grow before considering another change.
The frustrating part is that a truly simple rule was always available: alternate possessions from a fixed distance, sudden death after that, done. Instead the league kept adding conditional clauses to preserve as much of “real football” as possible. That’s a defensible goal. But it’s also exactly why nobody can explain overtime in one breath — one season into the “fix,” and heading into another year of it — anymore.t’s a defensible goal. But it’s also exactly why nobody can explain overtime in one breath anymore.
Sources: NBC Sports, NBC Insider, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, PFSN
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