The rule every football fan carries in their head is short and it has been true for most of the sport’s televised life: if you win the toss, you take the ball. Possession is the prize. You take the prize.
The exception is that in the postseason this stopped being true in 2022, and on Sunday night in Las Vegas it cost a team a Super Bowl.
The rule that was replaced
Overtime used to be close to sudden death. The team that received could win the game on its opening drive by scoring a touchdown, and the other team would never touch the ball. Under that rule the coin toss was worth a great deal and taking possession was obviously correct, because possession was the only thing on offer.
That version produced a playoff game in January 2022 in which two of the sport’s best quarterbacks traded scores for a quarter, one of them won a coin toss, and the other never played another down. The league changed the postseason rule in the offseason that followed.
What the new rule does to the arithmetic
Under the current postseason rule both teams are guaranteed a possession. If the receiving team scores a touchdown, the other side still gets the ball and a chance to answer.
This looks like a fairness adjustment and it is, but its more interesting effect is informational. It splits overtime into a team that plays blind and a team that plays knowing.
The team with the ball first has to make every decision against an unknown target. Fourth and two on the opponent’s thirty: kick, or go? Nobody can say, because nobody yet knows whether three points will be enough. Every judgment on that drive is made without the number that would settle it.
The team with the ball second has that number. It knows exactly what it needs, which converts every fourth down from a judgment into an arithmetic problem, and it knows whether the drive has to end in the end zone or merely reach field goal range. A coach with a target and a coach without one are not doing the same job.
So the new rule did not just add a possession. It moved the advantage from the team that receives to the team that answers, and it did so quietly enough that the old reflex survived the change.
What the record shows
San Francisco won the toss and took the ball.
The drive that followed went a long way and stopped short, ending in a twenty-seven yard field goal and a 22-19 lead. That is the blind decision in its purest form: a field goal taken because three points looked like something, by a team with no way of knowing whether three points were anything at all.
Kansas City then had the ball, a target, and no ambiguity. It drove seventy-five yards and scored a touchdown to win 25-22, the second Super Bowl in history to need overtime and the first to be played under the rule that made the second possession the better one.
The most useful evidence for the reversal is not in the play, though. It is in what the winning coach said afterwards. Andy Reid said that had Kansas City won the toss, it would have kicked, and that the decision had been worked out in advance with the analytics staff rather than on the field.
One team had rehearsed the new rule. The other had rehearsed the old one.
The defense of the losing call
It would be too easy to leave it there, and the defense deserves a hearing because it is not stupid.
Kyle Shanahan explained the choice in terms of what happens after both possessions. If the teams trade scores and remain level, the game continues, and the team that received first then gets the ball third. Taking it first is a way of buying that third possession, and in a fifteen minute period the third possession is the one that ends the game.
That reasoning is coherent. It is also a bet on reaching a stage that requires both drives to produce the same result, against the certainty of handing your opponent the one thing every coach wants, which is a scoreboard to aim at.
And it exposes what the reversal is really about. This was not a coach ignoring the rule. It was a coach applying a rule he knew to a situation whose arithmetic had changed underneath it, which is a different and much more common error than ignorance.
How long a reflex lasts
The interesting question is not whether the call was wrong. It is why a two year old rule had not yet rewritten the instinct of people whose profession is this.
Part of the answer is exposure. Postseason overtime is rare, and a rule that applies only in the postseason gets tested a handful of times a decade. A coach can go years without ever standing at midfield under it. Practice is what converts a rule into a reflex, and there is no practice available.
Part of it is that the old rule was correct for fifty years, and fifty years of correctness does not evaporate because a committee voted in the spring. Sport is full of these lags, where the written rule changes on a Tuesday and the behavior takes a decade, and they are among the more honest things it shows about how people actually hold knowledge.
What Sunday leaves
A trophy went to Kansas City and a rule went into the record as the thing that decided a Super Bowl, which is not how anybody wants a championship described and is nonetheless accurate.
The trophy is the large object. The small one went up at midfield in front of both captains, came down on the turf, and was called correctly by San Francisco. That was the last thing all night that went its way. Everything after it was settled by a rule two years old, applied by two coaching staffs, one of which had decided in advance what to do if the coin fell their way, and one of which had decided fifty years ago.
