NFL History | Allegiant Stadium, Las Vegas — The Overtime Rule Read Off the Scoreboard

Kansas City beat San Francisco 25 to 22 in overtime at Allegiant Stadium on 11 February 2024. Pro-Football-Reference's box score prints the periods raw, and they are reproduced raw here with no halftime line: San Francisco 0, 10, 0, 9, and 3 in overtime; Kansas City 0, 3, 10, 6, and 6. Attendance was 61,629 and kick-off was listed at 6:30 pm. The stadium's operator gives the building's capacity as 65,000. The two numbers sit side by side in this entry and no ratio is drawn between them.

The six in Kansas City's overtime column is the part worth stopping on. It is a touchdown with nothing added after it, because the game ended the moment the ball crossed the line and no extra point was attempted.

That column is the work of a vote taken on 29 March 2022, when the league's owners approved, 29 to 3, an overtime format for the postseason in which both teams get a possession even if the team with the ball first scores a touchdown. The league's own report of the vote records the commissioner citing data that seven of twelve postseason overtime games had been won on the first possession. The owners left the regular season alone. A club could therefore play a whole season under one overtime rule and its playoff run under another, and the difference did not announce itself on the field: what changed was what winning the coin toss was worth.

San Francisco won the toss at Allegiant Stadium and elected to receive. Kyle Shanahan said afterwards that the club had settled the decision before kick-off with its analytics staff, and that the reasoning ran to a third possession: if both sides scored, San Francisco would have the ball again (NFL.com, 12 February 2024). Kansas City had done the same kind of work and reached the opposite conclusion. Andy Reid had gone through the format with his squad during the playoffs, and the club's statistical analysis coordinator, Mike Frazier, had studied it; Kansas City wanted the ball second (CBS Sports, 12 February 2024). The toss gave each side the position it had chosen.

Then the losing team spoke. Kyle Juszczyk said he had not realised the playoff rules differed from the regular season's, and that no overtime strategy had been discussed. Arik Armstead said he learned what the rule was when it went up on the scoreboard inside the building (CBS Sports, 12 February 2024; CNN, 13 February 2024). The format had been on the books for two postseasons by then. CBS Sports described this as the first playoff game in which the new format was actually in effect; that characterisation is the publication's, and this entry does not extend it into a claim about Super Bowls.

What happened next is short. Jake Moody kicked a 27-yard field goal to make it 22 to 19. Kansas City converted a fourth and one at its own 42 on an eight-yard run by Patrick Mahomes and scored nine plays later, Mecole Hardman taking the throw (NFL.com and CBS Sports, 12 February 2024).

This entry does not say whether the older rule would have produced a different result. None of the sources consulted for it addresses that question, and settling it here would be arithmetic rather than a finding.

The asymmetry the 2022 vote created ended on 1 April 2025, when the owners voted, 24 of 32 and on a Philadelphia Eagles proposal, to amend Rule 16, Section 1 so that both teams get a possession in the regular season as well. The ten-minute regular-season period was left as it was (CBS Sports, 1 April 2025). Another entry in this series is pinned at the January 2022 playoff game in Kansas City that preceded the first of those two votes.

One line about the building itself. Its operator's statistics page describes a sliding field tray weighing nineteen million pounds and driven by seventy-two motors, which carries the natural grass out of the building between events, and an Al Davis Memorial Torch ninety-two feet tall.

Status note, September 2026. This entry describes the overtime rules as its sources record them, the most recent of those dated 1 April 2025. Nothing here establishes what the rule book says today, and every figure above is the one printed by the source named beside it rather than a current league statement.

Coordinate. 36.090030 N, 115.183440 W, precision plus or minus 250 m. This is a single-method pin and the method is disclosed. The Census Bureau's TIGER geocoder returns nothing at all for the stadium's own published address, 3333 Al Davis Way, in the one-line form, and nothing for the structured form with the town given as Paradise; a control query on 3150 Paradise Rd in Las Vegas matched instantly, so the geocoder was healthy and the federal address file simply does not carry that street. The Historical Marker Database returns no entries for Allegiant Stadium. The Socrata catalogue endpoints for data.clarkcountynv.gov, data.nv.gov and opendata.lasvegasnevada.gov each return 404 to this task, and the OpenStreetMap and Wikidata routes are closed to it. What remains is the Las Vegas Review-Journal's description of the site, published 26 August 2016 while the land was being sold: four parcels totalling 62 acres between Russell Road and Hacienda Avenue and between Polaris Avenue and Dean Martin Drive, just west of Interstate 15. Each of those four streets was geocoded separately through TIGER, and the point above is the centre of the box those four readings make. That is one method used four times rather than two methods, and the newspaper's account is a textual record of the site, not a positional one. The radius is sized from the parcel, which those readings make roughly 800 m north to south and 370 m east to west, and not from the decimal places of any single geocode.

Cover image: a joint honour guard from Nellis and Creech Air Force Bases presenting the colours before the Las Vegas Raiders played the Denver Broncos at Allegiant Stadium, 24 November 2024. U.S. Air Force photograph by Senior Airman Renee Blundon, public domain, via DVIDS. This is not Super Bowl LVIII. It is the same building at a regular-season game later in the same year, and it is here because it shows the bowl the overtime was played in. The file's Location field reads only Las Vegas, Nevada; it is the caption that places the camera inside the stadium.

Second image: Chief Master Sgt. Adrienne Warren of the 99th Air Base Wing and Chief Master Sgt. Jason Trickey of the 57th Wing on the sideline after taking part in the coin toss at that same November 2024 game. U.S. Air Force photograph by Senior Airman Renee Blundon, public domain, via DVIDS. Also not the Super Bowl; it is included because a coin toss is what this entry is about.