sitwap - NFL's huge overtime rule change gets tabled, change to kickoff gets voted down
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If the NFL’s overtime format is going to change before the 2017 season starts, the league’s 32 owners are going to have to do some wheeling and dealing over the next two months to make it happen.
The proposal to shorten the league’s overtime period from 15 minutes to 10 minutes for preseason and regular-season games was tabled on Tuesday. However, that doesn’t mean it won’t eventually pass.
According to Pro Football Talk, nine owners were going to vote against the rule change, which would’ve been enough to defeat the proposal. To become a rule, a proposal needs at least 24 votes from the NFL’s 32 owners, so nine votes against was barely enough to block the proposal.
According to NFL reporter Howard Balzer, there’s a chance the overtime rule could be voted on again at the league meetings in May since the first vote was so close. The owners who want to change overtime would only need to convince one other owner to vote for the change between now and May 22, when the spring league meeting begins in Chicago.
The NFL basically has three options at this point; The league could drop the proposal, try to vote on it again in May or come up with several options for the owners to vote on. When the extra point was changed in 2015, NFL owners actually had three options to choose from before the line of scrimmage for the kick was eventually moved back to the 15-yard line.
The biggest downside of shortening overtime to 10 minutes is that it would mean more ties, something that NFL VP of officiating Dean Blandino recently admitted.
“There’s no question that when you shorten that overtime period, the potential for ties does increase,” Blandino told ProFootballTalk over the weekend. “And I don’t think we feel that ties are necessarily a bad thing. They’re certainly great for tie-breakers when it comes to postseason. But ultimately you want to have a winner in the game.”
The competition committee had proposed the overtime change in hopes of improving player safety. According to NFL.com, the league feels that teams are at a “real disadvantage” when they have to play a Thursday game following a Sunday game where they played a 15-minute overtime period.
One other big rule proposal also got shot down on Tuesday: The league decided not to modify the kickoff.
Washington made a proposal that would move touchbacks to the 20-yard line if a kickoff went through the uprights. According to NFL.com, the proposal only received 11 of the 24 needed votes.
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