Again, given the nature of the rules, this isn’t entirely surprising. Regardless of how much a team was favored by pre-game, the odds of them winning stayed right around the 50% mark in the XFL simulation. And that would likely not be the case under XFL rules. While each team does get a chance to have the ball under the new XFL rules, conversion rates from five yards out are not a good proxy of team quality and are subject to a lot of variance.Īdditionally, there is some evidence in the NFL, albeit in a small sample, that teams favored more heavily in a given matchup are more likely to win than teams that are only favored slightly. The reasons for this are fairly intuitive. While the discrepancy in sample size is very relevant here, looking at it another way, the favored team only won more than 57% of its matchups in about 17% of the simulations. Overall, the betting favorite only won 50.6% of simulated games, barely better than a coin flip, and seven percentage points lower than what we’ve seen under the current NFL rules. For the sake of sample size, teams’ conversion rates for each season were calculated using their success rates and third or fouth down with between four and six yards to go. To compare this to what the XFL rules may look like if implemented, we ran 10,000 simulations of each of the 56 overtime matchups since 2015 based on the new XFL rules and a team’s conversion rate on plays similar to the “penalty kick” they would be taking. In both instances, this is lower than the 64% win rate for Vegas favorites in all matchups, but still seems to indicate the current rules allow the favorite to win more often than not. In that time Vegas favorites have won 16 of 28 matchups, which again is equal to 57%. Even after the NFL implemented some rule changes prior to the 2017 season, there has been virtually no change. In those games, the favorite has come out on top 32 times, equal to about 57%. Since Sports Info Solutions first started charting games in 2015, 56 games with a Vegas favorite have gone to overtime. But maybe the biggest question is: does it actually allow the better team to win more often? What would the new rules look like in the NFL?ĭeciding on what makes one team better than another can be a bit subjective, so for the sake of simplicity, we will use publicly available Vegas lines from SpreadSpoke as a measure of team quality. All of which is objectively good for the game. And beyond that, it would help to reduce the time of the game (something the NFL tried to accomplish by shortening the OT period to 10 minutes in 2017) and get rid of the possibility of a tie, which is universally hated. The thought of getting to see Mahomes and Brady duel in a soccer-style shootout should be enough to get any NFL fan excited. It is easy to see why people are excited about it. If teams are tied after 5 rounds, then rounds continue until one team is leading at the conclusion of a round, and that team will be the winner.” The team with more points after 5 rounds is the winner. Each possession starts at the opponent’s 5-yard line and the offensive team has one play to score. A ‘round’ will consist of one offensive play per team. Chief among them is a new shootout-style set of rules for overtime that bear more of a resemblance to something you would see in hockey or soccer.Īccording to the newly released XFL rule book, “Overtime shall consist of 5 ‘rounds,’ staged in alternating single-play possessions as is customary in NHL shootouts or MLS penalty kicks. Adding fuel to the fire, the XFL also released some of its major rule differences ahead of its inaugural season starting next month. The debate resurfaced this week after a pair of games went to overtime during Wild Card weekend.
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