The Bills never got a chance to match the Chiefs in overtime of their divisional-round playoff game after Kansas City won the coin toss and drove for a winning touchdown. It could spur a change to the postseason overtime rules.
The Colts have proposed an overtime rules change that would guarantee each team a possession in the regular season and the postseason.
The Bills’ proposal is tied to time, not possessions.
“I do think there will be some changes,” Bills General Manager Brandon Beane said Tuesday. “I don’t know how many proposals (there have been). We definitely out our stamp on one. Ours is going to be more, without getting into detail, instead of one possession and then another possession, is the time. You know, similar to basketball. You play five minutes of basketball. Both teams get (a chance). You know, baseball, there’s the top half and the bottom half. So a time limit, and we’re talking about the postseason only, to play it out. And that way, both teams will definitely have a chance and maybe even more than one possession.”
The Bills and Chiefs combined for 25 points in the final two minutes of the fourth quarter, but Josh Allen never got a chance to match Patrick Mahomes in overtime. One of the greatest games in NFL history left everyone, except the Chiefs and their fans, wanting.
“I just think let’s play it out, a certain amount of time,” Beane said. “I don’t know that that’ll be the final result in March at the owners meetings, but I think there’s gonna be some good proposals and hopefully it at least comes to the point where both teams get an opportunity.”
There could be more than the Bills’ and Colts’ overtime rules change proposals, and Beane joked the Competition Committee might have to discuss 32. The Bills just want to see a change of some sort, so no other team in the future experiences what they did in January.
“Experiencing what we experienced overall, I think there’s a better way out there,” Bills coach Sean McDermott said. ” And when you go through experiences like that and you experience those things firsthand in particular, you want to evolve the game. And I think evolving the game for us going through that like we did as a firsthand experience of saying, `Hey, we can make the game better if we just did X, Y and Z.’”