College football’s two-point overtime shootout is the worst

As the Georgia Bulldogs and Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets reached the eighth overtime, as the calendar turned from late Friday night to early Saturday morning, a weary nation was just hoping and praying that the madness would stop.

Seventh-seeded Georgia staged a furious second-half comeback only to send the game into overtime with its in-state rivals after entering the game as 19.5-point favorites. However, the Bulldogs ultimately emerged with a win that secured them a spot in the College Football Playoff…at least according to Joe Tessitore.

But we’ll take a look at the playoff implications of Georgia’s win and all the gloating about the SEC conference’s superiority over the fact that one of their supposedly good teams is struggling so mightily at home against a mid-tier ACC school save another day. OK, just kidding: Hypothetically, in the minds of SEC folks, Georgia easily wins the game in four overtimes.

Today it’s all about the incomprehensible format of college football overtime that makes no sense to anyone.

In 2021, college football’s overtime rules were changed so that the two-point shootout in penalty kicks now takes place after the second overtime. This was actually done in order to shorten the overtime and get a result faster. This year, Penn State and Illinois hosted a hilarious nine-overtime game that featured only three successful two-point plays – two in the eighth overtime and the Illini’s game-winner in the ninth overtime.

Even after this disgrace to football, the sport decided to stick with this format. And the Georgia-Georgia Tech game was somehow even more difficult.

The eight overtime periods lasted 40 minutes in real time, which seems counterintuitive when the entire goal of the rules is to make things more efficient. But it’s really all about what happened once the third overtime period was reached and the shootout began. The second overtime period ended at 11:38 p.m. ET on Friday. The game didn’t end until 12:03 p.m. ET on Saturday. This means that only 12 games took 25 minutes of real time. If you give each play 5 seconds, that means we have 24 minutes of downtime. There was even a commercial break between the end of the second overtime period and the beginning of the third period!

For some reason, after each overtime period, the teams had to switch sides of the field and run 94 yards in the opposite direction before we could see two more conversion attempts. Why? There is no difference in home advantage. It’s not like the wind at the three-yard line will make a difference. The constant running back and forth and downtime between overtime hours was ridiculous. At least when it comes to penalty shootouts in football, everything happens at the same end. Can you imagine how nerve-wracking it would be if the goalkeepers had to take turns running back and forth all the way across the pitch for every free kick?

And then there is the fact that every Team gets a time out for every Two-point attempt every Overtime, which Georgia coach Kirby Smart took full advantage of. When Smart casually walked toward the official to call a defensive timeout in the SEVENTH OVERTIME, there 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 to show America what real coaching looks like.

Georgia called three timeouts in the two-point contest alone, and there were 19 total timeouts in the game. At this point, it reached a level of absurdity that made the last two minutes of an NBA game seem like a mad dash to the end. Strictly speaking as a viewing experience (and not just if you view the two-point shootout as an unsatisfactory method of determining a winner), it turned something that should be intense and exciting into something equally ridiculous and infuriating.

Whoever said the coaches should get another timeout after every overtime should be sent to Rikers

— Shehan Jeyarajah (@ShehanJeyarajah) November 30, 2024

2 proposed rule changes for college overtime:

1. Stop pacing the field to switch sides

2. Stop giving them new timeouts before every 2-point attempt OT

— Warren Sharp (@SharpFootball) November 30, 2024

Eliminate overtime losses

— Jessica Smetana (@jessica_smetana) November 30, 2024

The stupidest thing about college football’s new OT rules is that we spend more time watching teams walk to the other end of the field between OTs than actually watching overtime play out

— Jack Grossman (@JackGrossman97) November 30, 2024

Clearly, the NCAA needs to realize that its overtime rules, largely in response to an epic LSU-Texas A&M game that only saw seven overtimes in 2018, are doing the exact opposite of what they are intended to accomplish.

College football’s current overtime rules, starting with the two-point shootout, specify only two possible outcomes – a successful attempt or a failure to score. By limiting possible outcomes, college football’s extended overtimes greatly increase the likelihood that the game will go on forever, especially because of timeouts and field changes.

A far more practical solution would be to actually place the ball further from the goal line, say the 40 or 50 yard line, and make two point conversions mandatory for each overtime period. In this scenario, a team could realistically score 0, 3, 6, or 8 points in each period. Four possible outcomes instead of two significantly reduces the chances of what we saw in Athens on Friday.

Fortunately, if the NCAA has shown us anything over the years, it is that it knows how to proactively make rapid and decisive changes that are in the best interest of the sport. So we can all expect Congress and state legislatures to force them to change college football overtime rules sometime in 2086.