With only three days left until Super Bowl 58, the focus of discussion is still on what Super Bowl 58 will be about. san francisco 49ers What we did and didn’t do in overtime kansas city chiefs.Kyle Shanahan’s decision and debate is heating up over both. whether there was a defect And the fact that the 49ers players may have been fully aware of what was going on.
This debate will intensify throughout the offseason and likely into the beginning of the 2024-25 season. But the most important takeaway from Super Bowl 58’s wild ending may not actually be that way. The NFL may have stumbled upon a near-perfect overtime system, but somehow most people aren’t talking about it.
The NFL has struggled with overtime rules for years. Sudden death meant that he absolutely had to receive the ball to start the extra frame. The league switched the system in 2010 to create a little more balance. If one team kicked a field goal on the first drive of overtime, the other team got the ball. If any other type of score (touchdown or safety) occurs, the game is over. The league implemented this rule for the 2010 playoffs and the 2012 regular season.
In 2022, the league will Latest changes to the playoffs, but not in the regular season. The new rules give each team at least one possession in overtime, even if the first team scores a touchdown on the first drive. Additionally, if the first team scores and the second team is still on its first drive at the end of the first overtime period, it would be the new “second quarter” of a playoff game. We will continue to do so during the second overtime period.
There is considerable debate as to whether the 49ers were right to receive the ball. Whatever your view, the fact that there are strong reasons on both sides of the argument is evidence that this is a good idea. Even better evidence? The analysis confirms that which decision is better is almost a coin flip.
March 2022, ESPN Analyst Brian Burke Organize tweet threads Analyze the probability of winning if you choose a kickoff versus receiving the first kickoff in overtime. You can read the full thread below, but the important thing is that if he matches a touchdown, the team that had possession of the ball first, assuming he doesn’t score his two points, means that you have a 50.29% chance of winning. Assuming the second team scores a tying touchdown and he scores two points, the first team’s probability of winning is 50.19%.
Super Bowl 58 was the first playoff game to go into overtime since the new rules went into effect in 2022. While you could argue about both kicking and receiving, it’s also fair to note that you might choose one strategy or the other to match up against a quarterback like Patrick Mahomes and Zach Wilson. The opposite strategy to counter a quarterback like that. My colleague Kyle Seale used a poker analogy in his Slack conversation on this topic, saying Shanahan played cards, not people. Analytically it made sense, but with Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes on opposite sidelines, can you really just follow the numbers and hope for the best?
The biggest question on my mind right now is not whether Shanahan was right, but when will this new system be implemented in the regular season? Following the 2010/2012 changes, the decision could be voted on at a league meeting later this spring. There was no real discussion of this, and one reason for that is that it had never been seen in actual game action. Now that we know what happens with the best bets, we’ll probably see the NFL get things right and add these rules to the regular season.
The NFL struggles with a number of things, including using humans on the sideline to manually check yards to goal and refusing to implement instant replay on larger penalties. However, they managed to figure out probably the best system to develop for resolving matches in overtime. Rules for extending playing time are up for debate, but overtime is infrequent and has already been extended when the first team makes a field goal.
It’s time for the NFL to extend this into the regular season and address concerns about overtime.
I simulated the new rules for NFL postseason OT. are they fair? Do teams prefer first or second possession? Should the team with second possession kick XP, or should they go for 2?…
— Brian Burke (@bburkeESPN) March 30, 2022
Yes, these rules are fair. This is the fairest overtime rule we’ve ever seen. Assuming the team with second possession doesn’t score 2 if they match a TD, the team with first possession wins 50.29% of the time. And yes, you need that precision. because…
— Brian Burke (@bburkeESPN) March 30, 2022
If the team with second possession goes for a TD and then goes for the 2, the team with first possession wins 50.19% of the time. It’s a very slight difference.
Bottom line, based on these results, you’d want to win the first possession and score 2 on the second possession TD. but…
— Brian Burke (@bburkeESPN) March 30, 2022
…the difference is so slight that it would take many seasons to really see the benefit. For each strategy he ran 120,000 SIMs.
Some thoughts…
— Brian Burke (@bburkeESPN) March 30, 2022
Each team has countervailing advantages. If there is an odd number of possessions, the team with first possession gets one additional drive.
The second possession team has a late-game advantage in that they know what they need to do to survive the first drive. and…
— Brian Burke (@bburkeESPN) March 30, 2022
…Going for 2 can reduce the first-mover advantage of the first possession team, but this effect is small.
— Brian Burke (@bburkeESPN) March 30, 2022
Although this simulation is not perfect, it closely matches the winning probabilities of the actual game. This is especially useful for questions like this when you don’t have a demonstrative example to train the model on.
— Brian Burke (@bburkeESPN) March 30, 2022
There may be enough bias in this simulation that these results are wrong, but the error is very small and we are very close to the point of indifference, so we can throw things to the wind and play with our opponents. It may be wise to let the team decide on possession.
— Brian Burke (@bburkeESPN) March 30, 2022
Finally, I don’t claim that this solves the problem. This is just one of the early models. FWIW, the same model gives a 57% advantage on first possession with the old sudden death rule. And the last OT rule gives him 53% Adv. If anything, we may be slightly underestimating the 1st-pos.
— Brian Burke (@bburkeESPN) March 30, 2022
