Rethinking overtime in the NFL

Football has an overtime problem, and it knows it. If there's a tie after four quarters, overtime is played in the sudden-death format: the team that scores first wins.

As at the start of the game, initial possession of the ball is determined by a coin toss. But there's where the trouble starts. Unlike at the start of a game, that coin toss often determines the winner. That's because, in overtime, a team needs only to kick a field goal to win, and it's not that hard to get in range for a field-goal try on a first possession.

"From 2000 through 2007, in 37 of the 124 overtime games, the team that won the initial coin toss won on its initial possession," write the Columbia economist Yeon-Koo Che and the Berkeley economist Terrence Hendershott, in the October issue of the online journal The Economists' Voice. Fans would be outraged if games were literally decided by a coin toss, but that's essentially what's happening now.

The commissioner of the NFL once said he'd like to see a ban on winning by a field goal on a first possession in overtime. That awkward solution never went anywhere. But in 2003, a Packers fan and mechanical engineer named Chris Quanbeck pitched a more elegant fix to the league: why not begin overtime with an auction of some kind for field position? The team willing to start closest to its own goal line would get the ball. (Imagine the refs intoning on their booming mics, "Do I hear the 30 yard line? Will anyone take the ball there? Twenty-five? Do I hear twenty? Fifteen?")

In the Economists' Voice, Che and Hendershott present the complex math that demonstrates the soundness of Quanbeck's proposal, and they suggest several variations on the auction theme. Almost any auction-like mechanism would be better than the current system, they say, but some are better than others.

Under one scenario, one team would name a field position and the other team could either accept it or require the first team to take that position. (Not unlike the "You cut, I choose" pie-sharing system.) Under another, both teams would give the refs sealed bids.

Because of what's known to auction theorists as the "winner's curse" (winners of auctions tend to pay slightly more than the object is worth; in this case, teams that won a field-position auction would have sacrificed more than they should have), Che and Hendershott propose a slight alteration to the sealed-bid system. The winner would take up field position that represented the average of the winning and losing bid.

Fans, the economists point out, could have fun on Monday morning second-guessing their coach's bidding strategy, even if their team lost--a lot more fun, anyway, than they'd have bitching about a coin toss.

PS As Che and Hendershott note, Tim Harford, of Slate and the Financial Times, wrote about this paper when it was in draft form.