Question

Critical Thinking: Did the NFL Rule Change Have the Desired Effect? Among 460 overtime National Football League (NFL) games between 1974 and 2011, 252 of the teams that won the overtime coin toss went on to win the game. During those years, a team could win the coin toss and march down the field to win the game with a field goal, and the other team would never get possession of the ball. That just didn’t seem fair. Starting in 2012, the overtime rules were changed. In the first three years with the new overtime rules, 47 games were decided in overtime and the team that won the coin toss won 24 of those games. Analyzing the Results

What do you conclude about the effectiveness of the overtime rule change?

Short answer

It can be concluded that the overtime change rule was not effective in reducing the number of overtime games that were won by the team that won the toss.

Step-by-step solution

Given information

In the years between 1974 and 2011, out of 460 overtime games, 252 games were won by the team that won the coin toss.

In the first 3 years beginning from 2012, there were 47 overtime games and 24 of those games were won by the team that won the coin toss.

Conclusion about the effectiveness of the overtime rule change

The number of overtime games that were won by the team that won the toss before the overtime rule change was not significantly greater than the number of overtime games that were won by the team that won the toss after the overtime rule change

This was proved by conducting the hypothesis test as well as the confidence interval in the previous exercise 2FDD.

Thus, it can be concluded that the overtime change rule was not effective in lowering the number of games that were won because of practising the unfair procedure that was prevalent before the rule was changed.