One of the best games of the young NFL season was the highly-anticipated Super Bowl rematch (that was really a Super Bowl rematch in name only) between the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos. While the two teams had faced off in the preseason, this was their first meeting in a meaningful game since the 43-8 beat down in February. The Seahawks appeared to be running away with the game at halftime, leading 17-3 and carrying all the momentum after a last-second touchdown. Denver tightened up on defense in the second half, turning a potential blowout into a punt-fest (won by Jon Ryan, whose booming punts forced Peyton Manning into long fields all day).
After a missed Seahawks field goal, a safety, and a touchdown after a Russell Wilson interception awarded them a short field, Denver was driving to potentially take the lead with just over two minutes to play. Then, Kam Chancellor, the All-Pro safety who has been battling bone spurs this season, leaped to the sky to pick off Manning and ran the ball back 52 yards. The play set up the Seahawks for a field goal and an 8-point lead. The Seahawks needed all eight of those points as Manning promptly drove down the field and tied the game after hitting Demaryius Thomas for an almost impossible two-point conversion.
The final three minutes and overtime featured classic Manning (for better or for worse), and classic Seahawks. First, Manning throws a potentially back breaking interception (classic Bad Peyton, classic late-game Legion of Boom defense). Then, Manning turns around and drives for the game-tying score (Good Peyton!). That set up an overtime where winning the coin flip would prove to be vital. Manning’s final drive tore the Seahawks defense apart. And Denver had shown it was capable of stopping Seattle offense. Seattle won the toss, received the ball, and promptly hustled and bustled their way 80 yards for the winning touchdown.
Because the Seahawks scored a touchdown, Manning never got a shot to counter — a fact that didn’t sit well with whiny pants Denver Post columnist Mark Kiszla, who essentially blamed the loss on the NFL’s dumb overtime rules:
The winner of a classic football game should never be determined by pure, dumb luck.
Unlike the Super Bowl, the only difference Sunday between the Broncos and Seattle was a flip of the coin.
His next line is even more bizarre:
Not to take anything away from the Seahawks’ 26-20 overtime victory against Denver, but if there’s anything we’ve learned from the NFL of late, it’s this: What’s fair got to do with anything in this league? And the more the rules change, the less we trust that justice is truly being served.
As 710 ESPN’s Danny O’Neil points out, yeah, Kiszla just went there. No justice for Jenay, no justice for Denver. Same thing. Fortunately, Kinszla abandons that dumb narrative and drops this piece of insightful journalism:
NFL overtime rules are stupid.
According to O’Neil, before the new overtime rules were implemented in 2012, the team that won the coin toss proceeded to win the game 52% of the time (we’ll just assume the team that won the toss chose to receive the ball every time). Now that a first possession field goal is no longer valid to win outright, the odds aren’t quite as “heavy” in favor of the winner of the coin flip. Sure, there’s a psychological advantage in having to put your defense out on the field and playing for a stop. Then, Russell Wilson started running more, which is something he does when he knows the defense is tired. It wasn’t unlike Wilson’s rookie year, when the Seahawks were stunned on a late game-tying field goal and had to go to overtime against the Chicago Bears. Wilson proceeded to run circles around Brian Urlacher (who probably considered retiring in the locker room that day). This was that all over again. The Broncos were a step slow, and he exploited that.
Back to Kiszla’s column, he doesn’t offer any solution to the NFL’s overtime policy. His team lost, so he gets to conveniently bitch about an instance where the NFL’s overtime rules worked against the team he covers. However, notice that he buries a mention of a fairly recent game when the overtime policy benefited the Broncos tremendously: Tim Tebow’s miracle 80-yard touchdown pass to beat the Steelers in the 2012 playoffs. Not a whole lot of complaints from Kiszla about overtime rules about that one.
[DenverPost, via 710ESPN]
