Monday Morning VI

Each year about this time I watch more NFL than usual, because the NCAA Football season takes a bit of a breather before Bowl Games begin. And each year, I learn all over again how much better the NCAA game is than the NFL, in part due to specific rules.

The most obvious difference is Overtime! What is the statistic, something like the majority of all NFL games that go into overtime are won by the team that wins the coin toss, simply because the other team never gets its hands on the ball! Incredible. Of course, the goofy commentators rarely note the fact, because of the dim light that would be cast on the NFL.

NCAA Overtime is soooo much better. And I admit, it is not perfect. If a college team has an excellent field goal kicker, three-and-out means about a forty-two yard attempt, which is not out of the realm of doable. If the NCAA started each offensive position at, say, the thirty-five yard line instead, it would be an almost perfect overtime system. But even now, as I have said, it is still soooo much better than the NFL.

Even Baseball, the sport that true football fans love to hate, has a maturity in its rules that puts football to shame. If you have ever been to some kind of umpire school, you quickly learn that Baseball Rules are designed to penalize a player or team who does something wrong to gain an advantage. And The Rules of Baseball do just that.

But check out Sunday Night's Packers-Lions game. I know, I know, two rotten teams. But the Green Bay Packer player did something bad to avoid a Safety, which would have given the ball and two points to Detroit. He tried to lob the ball out of the endzone. By the quirk of a rule that says, if a passer is "out of the pocket", it is not intentional grounding, so the Packers ended up with the ball, and the Lions lost two points. Even the game officials seemed to meet for an extraordinary amount of time, almost in disbelief that the rules would have them do what they had to do. Eventually, the game went into overtime, the Lions lost the coin toss and the game.

I also know that both teams had their chances in regular time. But my point is that the NFL is too much controlled by the Rules Committee and Officials, and not enough by the play on the field. History has shown us that when the NCAA takes the lead with something innovative, say like the two point conversion, it can take DECADES before the NFL swallows its pride and institutes that same rule.

The NFL should once again, swallow its pride, admit that the NCAA is on to something, and redo their archaic overtime.

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