The NFL will be holding league meetings next week that include the annual set of proposed changes to the rules made by the league’s competition committee.
One of those changes will deal with the way overtime works in the regular season and preseason. This won’t be a tweak to the current rules about whether both teams get the ball -- they do, unless a team scores a touchdown -- but to how long the overtime session lasts.
Judy Battista of NFL Media reports that the committee will propose shortening overtime to 10 minutes until the postseason, when the extra period would last 15 minutes and extend even further if the game remains tied. The idea behind the proposal is that a team would be at a “real disadvantage” if they played a full 15-minute overtime before playing on a Thursday night.
There have been 83 overtime games in the last five years, per NFL Research, and 22 of them have lasted for more than 10 minutes. That’s less than two percent of all the games played during those seasons, which doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea but suggests it won’t have much impact on overall life in the NFL if the change is adopted as a new league rule.