By the time the Georgia Bulldogs and Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets reached the eighth overtime period as the calendar shifted from late Friday night to early Saturday morning, a weary nation was just hoping and praying for the madness to stop.
Seventh ranked Georgia staged a furious comeback in the second half just to take the game with their in-state rivals into overtime after entering as 19.5 point favorites. However, the Bulldogs eventually emerged from the contest with a win that clinches a College Football Playoff berth… at least according to Joe Tessitore.
But we will save the playoff ramifications of Georgia’s victory and all the schadenfreude over SEC conference superiority seeing one of their supposedly good teams struggle so mightily at home with a mid level ACC school for another day. Ok just one quip – hypothetically in the minds of SEC folks, Georgia easily wins that game in four overtimes.
Today is all about the incomprehensible format of the college football overtime period, which makes absolutely no sense to anybody.
In 2021, the college football overtime rules changed, moving up the penalty kick style two point shootout to taking place after the second overtime. This was in effect done to try to shorten the overtime period and get to a result faster. That year, Penn State and Illinois staged a hilarious nine overtime game that featured just three successful two point plays – two in the eighth overtime and the Illini’s game winner in the ninth overtime.
Even after that traveshamockery of football, the sport decided to stick with the format. And the Georgia-Georgia Tech game was even more painstaking somehow.
The eight overtime periods took forty minutes of real time, which seems counter-intuitive if the entire goal of the rules is to make things more efficient. But it’s really all about what happened when the third overtime was reached and the shootout began. The second overtime period ended at 11:38 p.m. ET on Friday. The game wasn’t over until 12:03 a.m. ET on Saturday. That means it took 25 minutes of real time to run just 12 plays. If you give each play 5 seconds to take place, that means we got 24 minutes of downtime. We even got a commercial break in between the end of the second overtime and start of the third period!
For some reason, the teams had to switch sides of the field after every overtime period and walk 94 yards the opposite direction before we could see two more conversions being attempted. Why? There’s no difference in homefield advantage. It’s not like the wind is going to make a difference at the three yard line. The constant walking back and forth and downtime between the overtime periods were ridiculous. At least in soccer’s penalty kick shootouts, the action all takes place at the same end. Could you imagine how mind-numbing it would be if the goalkeepers had to alternate walking all the way back and forth across the field for each spot kick?
And then there’s the fact that each team gets a timeout for each two point attempt in each overtime period, something that Georgia coach Kirby Smart used to full effect. When Smart casually walked up to the official to call timeout on defense in the SEVENTH OVERTIME it should have been an immediate show cause penalty and he should have been taken off the sideline in handcuffs. It’s like he saw the Matt Eberflus debacle on Thanksgiving Day and decided he was going to show America what real coaching looked like.
Georgia called three timeouts in the two point contest alone and there were a total of 19 timeouts called in the game. At that point, it reached a level of absurdity that made the final two minutes of an NBA game look like a mad dash to the finish. Strictly speaking as a viewership experience (and not just speaking of the two point shootout as an unsatisfying way to decide a winner) it turned something that should be intense and exhilarating into something equally laughable and exasperating.
Whoever said that the coaches should get a new timeout every overtime should be sent to Rikers
— Shehan Jeyarajah (@ShehanJeyarajah) November 30, 2024
2 rule change suggestions for college overtime:
1. stop walking up and down the field to change sides
2. stop giving them new timeouts before each 2-pt try OT
— Warren Sharp (@SharpFootball) November 30, 2024
Eliminate overtime time outs
— Jessica Smetana (@jessica_smetana) November 30, 2024
The dumbest thing about the new college football OT rules is that we spend more time watching teams walk to the other end of the field between OTs than we do actually seeing the overtimes play out
— Jack Grossman (@JackGrossman97) November 30, 2024
Clearly the NCAA has to realize that their overtime rules, largely in response to an epic LSU-Texas A&M game that went to a mere seven overtimes in 2018, do the exact opposite of what they are intended to achieve.
The current college football overtime rules starting with the two point shootout only give two possible results – a successful try or a failure to score. By limiting the possible results, the extended college football overtime greatly increases the chances for it to go on forever, especially with the timeouts and field flipping.
A way more practical solution would be to actually put the ball further away from the goal line, say the 40 or 50 yard line and make two point conversions mandatory for each overtime period. In that scenario, a team could realistically score 0, 3, 6, or 8 points in each period. Four possible outcomes instead of two greatly reduces the chances of what we saw on Friday in Athens.
Thankfully, if the NCAA has showed us anything over the years, it’s that they know how to be proactive in making quick, decisive changes that is in the best interests of the sport. So we can all expect for them to be forced into action by congress and state legislatures to change the college football overtime rules sometime in the year 2086.
