Crossing Broad
George Pickens went full Donovan McNabb after the Sunday Night Football tie. You never go full McNabb:
I think it’s finally time to come to the conclusion that ties shouldn’t happen in the NFL. I gotta imagine before it was a player safety issue, but since the NFL has completely abandoned caring about that we might as well stop ties altogether. Just adopt the college football rules if you’re worried about player safety. Have a couple possessions start from a set yard line and then at a certain point move it to 2-point conversions. There, problem solved. Now we don’t have to have ties. It’s going to grind my gears the rest of the season to understand how many games we’re up on the Cowboys in the NFC East. Imagine if they actually had a chance this year. You try to remember the Cowboys record and by Week 10 you forget about the tie. 3-7 rolls off the tongue better than 3-6-1. It also looks ugly on the scorebug. Need a clean scorebug.
How many NFL players you think do not know the games can end in a tie? I think I’ll put it at like 20% and that might be low. It sounds like everyone gets out of college and just assumes the college and pro OT rules are the same. Pickens has been in the league for four years already. He just played in an overtime game two weeks ago against the Giants that went down to the wire. He had no idea that could’ve ended in a tie and I feel like the reaction is a tenth of what McNabb received back in 2008. We’re still here talking about it 17 years later:
A day after the Philadelphia Eagles and Cincinnati Bengals played to a 13-13 tie — the league’s first since 2002 — the focus wasn’t on how poorly the teams performed on the field. Instead, everyone wanted to know how it’s possible some professional football players, especially a 10-year veteran such as McNabb, don’t know simple rules about overtimes games.
“I’m sure there are plenty of rules that guys don’t understand, but I don’t think that has any factor whatsoever to do with the outcome of this game and how they played in the overtime,” Eagles coach Andy Reid said Monday. “I think that’s absurd. You play to win in that time, whether you think you have another overtime period or you don’t. And you play your heart out to win it in that time, and that’s how we approached it and that’s how the players approached it.”
Reid ignored the point. Whether the players’ ignorance about the overtime rule affected the outcome is debatable. It’s inconceivable and embarrassing that some of them didn’t know a game can end in a tie.
“I’ll take the...
