Tet's Journal: American Football: College football

Question: is it possible to have a tie in NCAAF games? Wikipedia implies that the teams just continue to play more and more periods of overtime until there's a winner. Is that right? Is there no sudden death decider, or can a game go on indefinitely?

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[account_deleted]

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[Ethelred Unraed]

This article on Salon.com has the answer. [salon.com] The NCAA rules are pretty much as Tet describes, with a game theoretically going on indefinitely -- in a sense like MLB baseball. And I think it's a much better system than the NFL, where the game is pretty much decided by the coin toss at the beginning of overtime.

Cheers,

Ethelred

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[account_deleted]

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It's not so bad as that

[turg]

The rules/scoring of American-style football are such that it is quite unlikely (almost unheard of) that no-one will score and it is also unlikey that both teams will score the same number of points in a period.

No ties

[FortKnox]

Yeah, each football team gets a chance to score: Start on the 35, I believe... so if there is no turnovers, and no TD, the team usually tries a FG. After the one team scores or turns over the ball, the other team gets it on the 35 and tries to score.
If after this exchange, the scores are tired, you go into another overtime period.
I've been in a game with 8 overtime periods. It can get long.

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[Pirogoeth]

I think after a certain number of OT periods, if you score a touchdown, you have to go for the two-point conversion instead of kicking an extra point. Since those are a little more difficult to convert, it presumably helps to keep the OTs from going on forever.