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Russell Wilson has a radical idea for breaking ties after OT

Daddy-to-be Russell Wilson wasn’t thrilled to walk off the field after Sunday’s strange 6-6 tie with the Arizona Cardinals. The quarterback thought he and his Seattle Seahawks teammates had played too long for the game to end with no real outcome.

So after the game, Wilson offered his own solution for games that remain tied after the 15-minute sudden death overtime. And it involves one field goal attempt with the entire game on the line.

“Let’s say we’re the away team. We win the coin toss, we get the ball on the 35-yard line going in. You kick one field goal,” Wilson told reporters in Arizona. “You can’t do anything else but a field goal. You make the field goal, the game’s over. If you miss the field goal, the game’s over and the other team wins.”

Seems like kind of an arbitrary way to decide 3+ hours of football, no?

“I just think that if you play that long, you’re putting your lives on the line,” Wilson said. “You should find a way to win. I don’t like ending in a tie.”

I’ll give Wilson this: I don’t like NFL games ending in a tie either.

Now, there haven’t been many since sudden death overtime was instituted in 1974.

Only 21, in fact.

But each of those games mucked up standings and playoff pictures that are usually so easy to decode. And 21 times there were people who invested a lot of their time and money into a product, only to get a result befitting the “other” football (soccer) or an old-school NHL game.

The NFL onfield product is anything but wishy-washy, so why let games end in that way?

Personally, I like two ideas for overtime:

1. Go 7-on-7 after one period of regular overtime. Yeah, players might be too tired at that point to go with this more exciting staple of summer high school leagues. But that’s what they get for not deciding things in 75 minutes of regular play. And considering the NHL’s success with 3-on-3 overtime, it might produce a lot of the same excitement.

2. Adopt college football overtime rules, but start each team on the five-yard-line and eliminate passing and kicking. This basically turns the game into a battle of goal line stands and what’s better in football than a goal line stand? Let’s see which team wants the ‘W’ more.

Of course, if you don’t like either of those suggestions, we could go with something more arbitrary like Wilson’s FG idea or have the mascots fight or have the coaches foot race. (Come to think of it, a foot race between Pete Carroll and Bruce Arians would have been fun.)

Or we could just give a loss to both teams.

With ties, there’s no such thing as a winner.

Russell Wilson doesn't like ties in the NFL. (AP).
Russell Wilson doesn’t like ties in the NFL. (AP).