COMMENTARY : Sudden Death No Way to End a Professional Football Game

Aren’t the 1990s the time for pro football to accept reality? I’m talking about the loaded cannon called sudden death.

The Ram victory over the New York Giants in the playoffs was the day NFL executives had hoped would never come.

The pros, for too many years, have attempted to gain a winner after regulation play ends in a tie with sudden death, or, to those who see the glass half full, sudden life.

After three hours of bone-breaking and the teams still even, the referee takes out a shiny silver dollar and flips it. The team captain who calls it correctly, they tell us, now has a 51% better chance of winning than he had before the coin was tossed.

One percent doesn’t seem like much, but try telling that to the Giants. There is no question that as the decade moves on and 40- to 50-yard field goals become commonplace, that percentage will rise considerably.

More and more sudden-death overtimes will be decided when the only player on the field without a dirty uniform kicks the ball 40 to 50 yards through the uprights. The Rams’ touchdown in overtime against the Giants was more the exception than the rule.

The only fair and sensible way to play overtime games is to permit each team to handle the ball on offense at least once in overtime. Then the team losing the coin toss has at least a reasonable chance of counterpunching a 50-yard field goal with its clean-uniformed kicker.

Taking this one step further, why not forget the sudden-death aspects of the overtime and play additional 10-minute periods to conclusion until there is a winner. Basketball has been successful with this method for years.

There are other rules still on the books that were applicable perhaps in the Roaring ‘20s but have outlived their usefulness.

Once, before specialists, a field goal was a dicey affair. It was considered to be as effective as a punt.

Now, with field goals being rung up as often as touchdowns, simple changes could make for much excitement. How about a one-point field goal inside the 20, a two-point field goal between the 20- and 40-yard lines and a three-point field goal from the 40 and beyond. There’s a bonus for a long shot in basketball, why not football?

Now that we’ve stolen a couple of regulations from basketball, how about the rule makers borrowing from soccer to speed up the game?

Anyone who has frozen in the stands in Chicago’s Soldier Field on a December afternoon must conclude that the cold has also slowed the timekeeper’s watch. The one-minute timeouts--three for each team a half--are closer to two minutes.

Add the automatic television timeouts for commercials, which range from two to three minutes, the two-minute warnings at the end of each half, the interminable delays after incomplete passes, runs out of bounds, the changing of the line sticks after a first down, and one is hard-pressed to understand why the players don’t die of boredom.

The rules make it possible for coaches to spend as much time figuring out how to stop the clock as they do trying to win the ballgame.

Quite simply, professional football should get together with Madison Avenue to speed up the game. One thought would be to play the game in a modified soccer approach.

The suggestion that intrigues me the most is to add five minutes to each quarter and subtract dead-clock time. There would be four 20-minute quarters with no stopping the clock for measurements, runs out of bounds, or incompletions. It certainly would make for a lot of action, with players hustling to get back into formation. They sure do it in the hurry-up offense.

The only compromise I would make to this continuous-play theory would occur in the last two minutes of the game.

The last two minutes of today’s football is a shambles. The losing team on offense spends its time trying to beat the clock by throwing uncatchable passes, its runners scratching and crawling to get out of bounds.

The team that’s winning and on offense spends its time having the quarterback kneel down four times after receiving the ball from the center, receiving congratulations and pats on the back while the game is still going on. Great action.

A simple solution would be to inject a new two-minute rule. The clock starts when the ball is snapped and is stopped when the whistle ends the play. That way, guys don’t have to run out of bounds and the winning team on offense can’t make use of the 30 seconds between each play to run the clock.

Finally, instant replay officiating must go. The pros and cons are irrelevant when instant replay is restricted to only certain aspects of the game, such as fumbles and interceptions. What happens in observing the replay when one sees a flagrant violation, such as a clip or hand on a face mask, that went unnoticed by the officials before the fumble or interception? Does one reward a team by confirming that it recovered a fumble, even though it happened through an illegality?

In American justice, an accessory to a crime is as guilty as the culprit and that makes the football rule makers guilty as hell.