Here’s how few games the new 5-OT rule will impact

These games happen so rarely, it’s not worth getting bent out of shape over.

The NCAA announced a slight change to its traditional college football overtime rules. Now, once a game hits the fifth overtime, teams will just line up for alternating two-point conversion attempts from the 3-yard line, rather than lining up at the 25 and attempting conventional drives.

This is notable, given that we had two games hit five OTs or more in 2018, including an especially memorable seven-OT banger between LSU and Texas A&M.

Why would the NCAA consider doing this at all? Well, there’s player safety to consider, especially since these players are, well, minimally compensated amateurs. Completely exhausted players could lead to increased injury risk and put them at a disadvantage for the following week.

Some college football fans think this is just another overreach by the NCAA, trying to kill all of our fun. But you know what? I actually think this is a perfectly acceptable change. Here’s why.

Games that go beyond the fifth overtime are REALLY rare.

We’ve had regular season overtime games from 1996 onward. We had 33 in 2018 (including bowls), and the vast majority concluded after one overtime. That’s pretty typical historically, with teams usually playing between 25 to 40 overtime games a season.

Finding the exact number of overtime games is tricky. This Reddit user tracked 636 overtime games from 1996-2015, and Sports-Reference’s GameFinder tool only has games from 2000-2018, but still turns up over 650 overtime results. So we can say we’ve had over 700 overtime games involving FBS teams since 1996.

Do you know how many of those FBS games hit five overtimes or more? Just 11. That’s not even one every other season!

Here’s the whole list, from Wikipedia:

• 2001: Ole Miss 58, Arkansas 56, in 7 OT
• 2002: Tennessee 41, Arkansas 38, in 6 OT
• 2003: Alabama 51, Tennessee 43, in 5 OT
• 2003: Kentucky 71, Arkansas 63, in 7 OT
• 2005: Western Michigan 60, Ball State 57, in 5 OT
• 2006: North Texas 25, FIU 22, in 7 OT
• 2013: Buffalo 26, Stony Brook (FCS) 23, in 5 OT
• 2016: UTSA 52, UTEP 49, in 5 OT
• 2017: Buffalo 71, Western Michigan 68, in 7 OT
• 2018: Hawaii 44, San Jose State 41, in 5 OT
• 2018: Texas A&M 74, LSU 72, in 7 OT

Especially good or meaningful games that went that long? Those are even rarer.

We’ve had ranked teams face each other and play at least five overtimes exactly once in college football history, and that was last year’s LSU-Texas A&M game.

No team from a non-SEC power conference has ever played in a five-OT game. Only two other teams were ranked in the AP Poll while entering a fifth overtime.

For every extremely long football game that actually managed to be good, like last year’s LSU game or 2003’s Arkansas-Kentucky game, we also run the risk of games like say, 2006’s North Texas-FIU game, where neither team could score 30 points ... after seven overtimes. That box score is a symphony of sadness.

That’s the dirty little secret here. A lot of these games aren’t actually good.

Sure, they’re close! But games that long test the depth and stamina of even the best, most resourced teams. And when teams that don’t really have depth under the best of circumstance suddenly have to play a lot more football ... at best, you get really ugly football.

Take the other massive overtime game from the 2018 season, Hawaii’s five-OT slugfest win over San Jose State. This game featured one of the worst teams in FBS (a winless SJSU squad), six missed field goals, another missed extra point, a team that couldn’t rush for even 1.5 yards a carry, and 106 total pass attempts. It wasn’t efficient or explosive, but it was long! And if you look at some of the other games on this list, this game’s stat profile isn’t an aberration.

This new rule could help mitigate the worst edge cases without disrupting what makes college overtime so fun.

If the last 20 or so years are any indication, this rule change should only impact a tiny number of games that you probably weren’t going to watch anyway. It’s a way to help soften the blow of the longest games for athletes, but doesn’t rob the fan or the sport of overtime, generally.

If the new format is a dud, well, it can always be tweaked again. Football rules get tweaked all the time! And if anybody complains about losing on a two-point conversion attempt at the sixth overtime, well, it’s pretty clear that they would have lots of chances to win the game beforehand.

There are lots and lots of things to holler at the NCAA about. I’m not sure this should crack the top of the list.

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