After the shootout: how the NFL keeps borrowing soccer's biggest stage

On 10 July 2026, CBS Sports published a column arguing that the NFL's regular-season tie has outlived whatever usefulness it ever had, and proposing two rule changes designed to manufacture the kind of knife-edge finish the 2026 World Cup has been delivering from the spot. The piece, written by Cody Benjamin, names two specific mechanisms: a possession-based shootout in which each team's offence gets the ball at its own 25-yard line and tries to score in a fixed number of plays, and a sudden-death conversion attempt in which each side chooses to go for one or two points from the two-yard line, with the higher value winning outright.

The proposal lands in a wider sports-business environment where broadcasters and leagues have spent two years treating knockout football as the most replayable content on the planet. Penalty shootouts, the piece notes, are the rare sports moment that pulls casual viewers back in real time; the league that can credibly promise one is the league that can sell the next advertising cycle.

The borrowing pattern

The NFL has form here. The league adopted a modified sudden-death overtime in 2010 after a postseason controversy and revised it again in 2012 to a possession-based format. Each change borrowed structural logic from college football's rules committee, which in turn had been quietly borrowing from arena football and the CFL. The CBS proposal is the next iteration of that pattern, except the donor sport is not a North American cousin but the global game.

American leagues have a long, well-documented habit of importing moments from soccer. MLS experimented with shootouts in its early years before dropping them. The NHL staged a one-off skills competition at an All-Star Game that mimicked football's penalty kick in spirit if not in form. The XFL, in its third iteration under new ownership, ran a three-point conversion shootout as a tiebreaker in 2023. None survived contact with the league's regular-season product. Each, however, kept the idea alive in the broadcaster's playbook.

Why now

The CBS column lands a fortnight into a World Cup cycle that has, by any available measure, generated the kind of viewer replay numbers US broadcasters spent the previous decade trying to manufacture domestically. Penalty kicks compress an entire tournament's tension into a single, shareable, mostly un-choreographed moment. They also do something the NFL has struggled to do with its own tiebreaker: produce a winner that no one disputes on Tuesday morning.

The league's incentive structure is plain. Regular-season games that end in a tie deliver roughly half the advertising value of games that produce a decisive result, because the post-game highlight package is shorter and the social-media cycle is muted. A rule change that converts a meaningful share of those ties into theatrical finishes is, in advertising terms, a content upgrade.

What the counter-narrative looks like

The strongest objection is also the oldest. Football is a possession-and-momentum sport. A possession-based shootout, run in isolation, strips out the defensive front, the two-minute drill, the weather, and most of what makes an NFL Sunday feel like an NFL Sunday. Critics inside the coaching ranks, including former Super Bowl-winning head coaches quoted in previous CBS coverage of overtime proposals, have argued that gimmicks erode the product's distinctive texture.

The two-yard-line conversion shootout is the more interesting of the two ideas. It borrows not from soccer but from the league's own two-point chart, and it preserves the chess match between offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator that regular overtime already rewards. Its weakness is mechanical: a team that wins the coin toss and chooses defence first can, in many game-states, force a loss by simply declining to score. The column does not address that edge case in any detail.

The wider counterpoint is that the World Cup's penalty shootout only matters because the rest of the match has already exhausted every other route to a winner. Regular-season NFL football is not in that state. Most overtimes end with a field goal or a touchdown inside ten minutes. Manufacturing drama the sport has not asked for risks changing the rhythm of the games that fund the league's $13bn-a-year media-rights package.

Stakes and uncertainty

What the sources do not specify is whether the NFL's competition committee has the appetite to take this up before the 2027 cycle. Recent rule changes have moved on longer injury timeouts, hip-drop tackling, and the kickoff formation; overtime has not been formally reopened in the published agenda. The CBS column is therefore best read as a market signal: the broadcaster that just paid $2.7bn a year for the Super Bowl is signalling the kind of moment it would like to keep selling.

The unresolved question is whether the league's actual customers want it. The two ideas are pitched to a casual audience that the league believes is currently watching soccer instead of football. Whether that audience, given the choice, prefers a manufactured finish to a forty-yard walk-off field goal is the empirical question the league's research staff has not, on the available evidence, answered in public.

How Monexus framed this: the wire coverage framed the proposal as a curiosity; we treated it as a content-economics story about which sport lends which moment to which broadcaster.