NFL Overtime: Both Teams Get the Ball Now, Which Makes the Coin Toss Harder

The old problem, stated properly

Sudden death overtime had a defect that no amount of arguing about fairness could fix: the coin toss decided too much.

Under the original rule, the team that won the toss and drove for a touchdown won the game. The other team’s offence never took the field. Two hours of football, and the last meaningful event was a coin.

The 2022 patch helped — a first-drive field goal no longer ended it, though a touchdown still did. That was better and still asymmetric, because a touchdown is exactly what a good offence sets out to score.

From 2025, the postseason rule applies everywhere: both teams are guaranteed a possession, whatever happens on the first drive.

But the guarantee has holes, and they are the interesting part

Two exceptions survive, and both are correct.

The defence can still end it immediately. A pick-six, a fumble returned for a touchdown, or a safety on the first drive finishes the game there.

That is not an oversight. Those are defensive scores — the second team’s own unit has already been on the field and has already determined the outcome. There is nothing left to guarantee. A rule that gave the offence a possession after its defence had just conceded a pick-six would be guaranteeing a response to something the team did to itself.

The clock can still deny you. Regular season overtime is a single 10-minute period. If the first team uses all ten minutes on one drive, the game ends without the other side touching the ball.

So the guarantee is really a guarantee of opportunity subject to time — which is how the rest of football works. A team trailing at the two-minute warning is not owed a possession either.

The playoffs do it properly

Postseason overtime is a 15-minute period, and if the score is level, or both teams have not completed a possession when it expires, play continues into a second overtime period.

That is a genuinely different design: not an extension with a cap, but a new game that runs until somebody wins.

The split is defensible. A regular season game can end in a tie and the league can live with it. A playoff game cannot, so the postseason accepts the cost — exhausted players, a four-hour broadcast — in exchange for a result.

Why winning the toss is now a real decision

Here is what the rule change actually did.

Under sudden death, the coin toss had one correct answer: take the ball. There was no strategy, only luck.

Now the second team plays with perfect information. If the first team kicks a field goal, the second knows a field goal extends the game and a touchdown wins it. Fourth-and-two from the 40 stops being a judgement call and becomes arithmetic.

The first team has no such clarity. Kick the field goal and you may have set a target too low. Go for it on fourth down and a failure hands over a short field.

Knowing exactly what you need is a real advantage, and it is why coaches now genuinely debate deferring — something that would have been malpractice under the old rule.

This is the same structure as a penalty shootout, where research has repeatedly found an edge for shooting first because of the pressure of chasing. Football’s overtime has landed on the opposite conclusion: when the target is a drive rather than a single kick, the information is worth more than the initiative.

Compare the tiebreak, tennis’ answer to the same problem — a decisive procedure bolted onto a game that could otherwise run forever, designed so that the serving order alternates and no one holds the advantage for long.

What it does to the last two minutes of regulation

An underrated consequence: the change alters how teams play the end of the fourth quarter.

Under sudden death, a team tied with a minute left had a reason to be conservative. Overtime was close to a coin flip, and a coin flip is a decent outcome — better than a risk of losing in regulation.

With both possessions guaranteed and a hard 10-minute cap, overtime is a worse proposition for the weaker team and a less certain one for everybody. That pushes teams to try to win in regulation rather than settle for the extra period.

Rules about overtime are never only about overtime. They change the value of the situation immediately before it, which is where most of the football actually gets played.

For the rest of the game’s structure, see NFL rules, how many points a touchdown is worth, and the dynamic kickoff, the other recent rule the league priced rather than banned.