The Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys played 70 minutes of NFL football on Sunday night, resulting in a 40-40 tied ball game.
But in the aftermath of Micah Parsons’ return to Dallas (after being abruptly traded), there are still more questions than answers following that Sunday Night Football thriller that ended in a anticlimactic draw. The leagues tweaked overtime rule for the regular season, which is now essentially the same as the postseason, has stirred up some emotions.
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In the offseason, the NFL made a change to the regular season overtime rule, allowing both teams to have an offensive possession regardless of whether the first team scores a touchdown. Previously, if the team who received the ball first in overtime scored a touchdown, then the game was over at that point. That version of the overtime rule was implemented in 2010, doing away with the sudden death overtime rule that had been in place since 1974.
Overtime was first introduced in 1974, when the NFL added a fifth 15-minute quarter that teams would compete in a sudden death period where the first team to score wins. If the opposing teams played all four regulation quarters and the final sudden death quarter and were remained tied, only then would the game end in a tie.
Sudden death overtime in the NFL was the norm until a rule change (or tweak) in 2010 where the league then changed it to where an opening possession touchdown in overtime would end the game immediately. In 2017, the NFL tweaked overtime once again by shortening the period from 15 to 10-minutes. Then just a few years ago in 2022, the league made another change, this time allowing both teams a possession on offense even if the first team scored a touchdown. Now this is the standard overtime rule for the regular and postseason.
Week 5’s Sunday night game between the Packers and Cowboys was only the fifth time since the overtime rule change in 2010, that a game ended in a tie following field goals by both teams.
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