Inside the NFL tie's sudden disappearance
When NFL games end in a tie, some contestants profess confusion and ignorance. Steelers running back Najee Harris and retired Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb headline the group of players and coaches who have admitted they didn't know ties were possible.
No other Big Four league tolerates ties, but even in football, these sporadic, mutually deflating results have vanished. We're in the longest stretch without a tied NFL game - just over two years - in more than a decade. It's the first dearth of stalemates since overtime was shortened from 15 to 10 minutes.
Exactly 558 regular-season games have been won since the last tie on Dec. 4, 2022, when the Commanders and Giants traded punts and set the stage for New York's Graham Gano to miss a last-ditch, 58-yard field goal. Their 20-20 draw punctuated a flurry of ties - seven between 2018-22 - that stemmed from teams having less time on the clock to score.
Unless an OT period is deadlocked in the next month, back-to-back seasons will elapse without a tie for the first time since 2009-11.
Ties were routine before the addition of overtime. The 14 recorded in 1926, back when games were played in a cloud of dust, included 10 unsightly scoreless draws. Seven ties occurred in an 11-week span in 1973, the last regular season to predate sudden death.
Fallow decades followed. There were only two ties in the 1990s - clustered in consecutive weeks in 1997 - and two throughout the 2000s. A 2012 rule change that forced teams to score a touchdown to win on the opening drive sparked a trickle of ties, including two apiece in 2016, 2018, and 2022.
Around the NFL, 27 teams have gone to overtime and 18 have won at least once since the '22 Commanders-Giants impasse, per Stathead.
The tie column emptied for a few reasons.
The driving force in 2024 is offensive prowess. The average offense has added more expected points per play in overtime (0.15) than in any season this century, according to TruMedia.
Nine of this season's 11 OT winners scored on their first offensive possession. Ten clinched the game with a scoring march of more than 50 yards. Kirk Cousins' 45-yard touchdown pass, Matthew Stafford's 39-yard TD strike, and Derrick Henry's 51-yard breakaway gallop helped cement various triumphs.
Offenses were inefficient in 2023 (minus-0.04 EPA/play in 13 OT games), but the Jets and Ravens housed walk-off punt returns, and no team around the league undermined its gains with a turnover. The Colts and Eagles mounted 75-yard touchdown drives to negate opposing field goals. NFL kickers were 9-for-9 in the extra frame last year, with three clutch makes in the final two minutes, boosting their OT hit rate since Gano's 2022 whiff to 90.5%.
Blunders prolong and seal ties. There were seven missed kicks in overtime, as well as three fumbles lost by the Steelers, across the seven stalemates since 2018. No one won a 37-37 shootout when the 2014 Bengals and Panthers traded long, successful field goal drives before Cincinnati's Mike Nugent shanked a 36-yard chip shot.
Errors piled up in the 2002 Falcons-Steelers draw. Both sides blocked a field goal and Pittsburgh quarterback Tommy Maddox was picked off, but he also completed a Hail Mary throw to Plaxico Burress … who was downed at Atlanta's 1-yard line as time expired.
Two even, low-scoring atrocities horrified Sunday night viewers.
2016 - Cardinals 6, Seahawks 6: Half of the points in this prime-time debacle came from a pair of overtime field goals, but both kickers (Arizona's Chandler Catanzaro, Seattle's Steven Hauschka) somehow proceeded to miss from inside 30 yards, belying their 94.6% combined career success rate from that trivial distance.
1997 - Giants 7, Washington 7: There were 22 total punts and Washington's backup QB, Jeff Hostetler, committed a ludicrous three giveaways in overtime after spelling the injured Gus Frerotte, who headbutted a concrete wall to celebrate a touchdown. Washington's other OT drives produced a stuffed fourth-down run and an errant 54-yard field goal that mirrored an earlier Giants miss.
Any tie over the remainder of 2024 would come unusually late. The latest of three December ties in the overtime era happened in Week 15 of the strike-shortened 1982 season. The lowly Baltimore Colts knotted the Packers 20-20 to avoid complete futility, achieving the lone bearable result of their winless 0-8-1 year.
Ties against Pittsburgh broke interminable losing streaks for the 2018 Browns (they had just gone 0-16) and 2021 Lions (they had dropped 12 straight over two seasons). On Sunday, the Steelers face a rare team - the Eagles - with more ties than them since OT debuted. Another matchup to watch is Week 17's divisional clash between the Packers and Vikings, who played to level terms three times in the distant and recent past (1978, 2013, 2018).
Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.