The NFL Rules Committee voted to change the overtime format for the post-season in the National Football League, and the new rules passed by a 28-4 margin. To put the new rules in a nutshell, a team can now only win in overtime without the other team getting the ball if they score a touchdown on the first drive of the extra session. If they kick a field goal, the other team will get a shot to at least match them. If they score a touchdown, the game is over. . .if they kick a field goal, it then goes to sudden death. . .if they fail to score, the game is over.
The four teams that voted against it were the Buffalo Bills, the Baltimore Ravens, the Cincinnati Bengals. . .
Oh, and the team that probably would have really benefited from this rule had it been in place a couple of months ago. . .the NFL's best team in 2009, your Minnesota Vikings. I guess the rumors of the Vikings "whining" about the rule sort of go up in smoke now. . .unless you ask the people in the comment section of the post from Pro Football Talk linked above. Honestly, can anybody read the comments of any post at PFT without the annoying sound of banjos running through their heads?
But, you know. . .it sure would be nice if a sports league would make a rule change like this before a Minnesota sports team got kicked in the teeth by it. This isn't the first time it's happened, either. After the bogus Nate Poole "touchdown catch" in 2003. . .and anybody that thinks that schlub would have gotten both feet down regardless of Brian Russell's push or not is a biased, drooling, mouth-breathing fool. . .the NFL did away with the "force out" rule. (Yes, I know it wasn't right after. But the important thing to remember is that, as usual, the Vikings got screwed.)
And it's not just the Vikings, either. . .in 2008, the Minnesota Twins finished the regular season tied with the Chicago White Sox atop the American League Central. The Twins had the upper hand in the head-to-head series against the White Sox. . .but, since Major League Baseball rules necessitated a coin flip, the division tie-breaker was held in Chicago rather than at the Metrodome. The Twins went on to lose that game and fall out of the playoffs. The next year? Yeah. . .MLB decided that coin flips really weren't the best way to decide these sorts of things, and when the Twins and Tigers wound up tied, the game was played at the Metrodome based on Minnesota's head-to-head season advantage over Detroit. And I'm sure we all remember who won that game, don't we?
But, it is what it is. I suppose the best solution is for the Vikings to just win the whole thing in 2010 and beat all of their opponents by three touchdowns so we don't have to worry about any other potential BS rules. Now, if we can just get into an NFC Championship game that isn't governed by BS officials. . .