NFL History | GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium — The Rule Changed for January and Not for September

On 23 January 2022 the Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs played an AFC divisional game on this ground that was decided by a rule the league rewrote sixty-five days later — and rewrote for January only.

Pro-Football-Reference records the result as Kansas City 42, Buffalo 36, in overtime, with a 6:30 pm kickoff at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium. Its scoring summary gives the closing sequence: a 27-yard touchdown pass to Gabe Davis with 1:54 left and a two-point conversion, putting Buffalo ahead 29-26; a 64-yard touchdown pass to Tyreek Hill with 1:02 left, putting Kansas City ahead 33-29; a 19-yard touchdown pass to Davis with thirteen seconds left, putting Buffalo ahead 36-33; and a 49-yard Harrison Butker field goal as the clock expired, tying it at 36. Twenty-five points were scored in the last one minute and fifty-four seconds of regulation.

Then the game ended without Buffalo's offence taking the field again. Pro-Football-Reference logs one overtime scoring play, an 8-yard touchdown pass to Travis Kelce with 10:45 showing in a fifteen-minute period — four minutes and fifteen seconds into overtime — and no overtime points for Buffalo. The NFL's own account of the subsequent rule change describes Kansas City as having scored on the first possession. Under the format then in force, a touchdown on the opening overtime possession ended the game immediately, and that is what happened.

## The rewrite, and its boundary

On 29 March 2022, at the annual league meeting in Palm Beach, Florida, the clubs voted 29-3 to guarantee both teams a possession in overtime. The league's own report of the vote records that it applied to postseason games only. Reporting the same day in the Boston Globe and by CNBC carries the date and the same limitation.

The boundary was raised in the room. In the league's account of the meeting, Commissioner Roger Goodell noted that of the twelve postseason overtime games played under the outgoing format, seven had been won on the first possession, and said he did not expect the postseason change to lead to a regular-season one, his stated reading being that the clubs liked the regular-season rule as it was. So from September 2022 a regular-season game at this stadium and a playoff game at this stadium were governed by different overtime rules.

## This had happened before, in the same shape

The format the 2022 vote replaced had itself arrived as a postseason-only measure. In March 2010 the clubs voted 28-4 to adopt modified sudden death — under which a field goal on the opening possession no longer ended the game, though a touchdown still did — and the league's contemporaneous report of that vote also records that it applied to playoff games only. The occasion was the NFC Championship Game of the previous season, in which New Orleans won the coin toss, drove, and kicked a field goal to beat Minnesota.

Two numbers were cited to the clubs in 2010, and they count different things. The team winning the overtime coin toss had won on its first possession 34.4 per cent of the time since 1994; across the previous fifteen years it had won the game, by any route, 59.8 per cent of the time. The first figure is about the rule. The second is about the coin.

Rich McKay, chairman of the competition committee, is reported in that same account as saying there was considerable sentiment in the room for changing the regular-season rule too, but that the committee wanted to take its time and study it. Football Zebras dates the extension of modified sudden death to the regular season to 2012. The NFL's own overtime rules page records that owners later voted to extend the format to the regular season, but gives no year for it.

So: postseason 2010, regular season 2012 — two years. Postseason 2022, regular season 2025 — three years.

## The two clocks

Possession was not the only axis on which the two regimes diverged. In 2017 the regular-season overtime period was shortened from fifteen minutes to ten. The postseason period was not. From that point the same fixture, played by the same two clubs on the same field, ran a fifteen-minute overtime in January and a ten-minute overtime in September.

On 1 April 2025, at the annual meeting in Palm Beach, the clubs adopted a competition committee proposal extending the guaranteed possession to the regular season, subject to the ten-minute period. The Atlanta Falcons' report of the vote describes it as aligning the postseason and regular-season overtime rules, and on possession it does. It does not align them on the clock. A postseason overtime repeats its fifteen-minute periods until somebody wins and cannot end in a tie; a regular-season overtime stops at ten minutes whether or not the guaranteed possessions have been completed, and can still end in a tie. Football Zebras sets out that a postseason overtime may continue into a second period precisely in order to complete a possession the rules require, which the regular-season format will not do.

## What the corpus already shows about the older rule

Twenty-nine years and twenty days before the game argued here, on 3 January 1993, Buffalo won a playoff game in overtime on this vertical's Rich Stadium entry when Steve Christie kicked a 32-yard field goal — the whole of the overtime scoring in Pro-Football-Reference's account. A field goal ended a playoff game, and nothing in the rulebook moved. In January 2022 a touchdown ended a playoff game and the rulebook moved inside ten weeks. What separates the two is not the ending but the record either sat in: by January 2022 the league had twice changed an overtime rule for the postseason first and for the regular season afterwards.

## Status, as at 4 September 2026

At the 2026 annual league meeting on 1 April 2026 in Phoenix, the clubs approved five playing-rule changes — covering onside kicks, kickoffs from the fifty-yard line, receiving-team alignment in the setup zone, consultation on disqualifications, and a one-year provision on correcting clear and obvious officiating mistakes. None concerned overtime. The position described above is therefore the position going into the 2026 season, stated as at 4 September 2026, and should be re-checked after the 2027 annual league meeting.

## Coordinate

The pin is 39.048936, -94.483999, with a precision radius of 150 metres, and it is the centre of the stadium bowl rather than a doorway.

Two independently maintained sources agree to within eleven metres: the OpenStreetMap way 65960012, tagged as a stadium, whose drawn outline spans roughly 250 metres by 250 metres, and Wikidata's coordinate statement for Arrowhead Stadium at 39.048889, -94.483889. Neither is a government property record, and that is worth stating plainly.

The government routes were tried, and what each returned is recorded here. The United States Census Bureau's geocoder returns 39.048923, -94.486489 for 1 Arrowhead Drive, about 215 metres west of the pin; it is an interpolation along a street address range, not a rooftop point, and the offset is in the direction of the road. Kansas City's open parcel layer address-matches 1 Arrowhead Drive to a tract of about twenty hectares carrying zero assessed improvement value — that is apron and parking, not the building. The one parcel in the Truman Sports Complex carrying a large improvement value sits about 550 metres from the venue centre and is not the bowl. Kansas City publishes no address-point or building-footprint layer, and its energy and water benchmarking disclosure — which covers large buildings and would ordinarily be the second leg — does not reach this stadium, the complex being county property rather than a building subject to the municipal ordinance.

## Cover image

United States Air Force photograph by Staff Sergeant Joshua Hastings, 509th Bomb Wing, taken 14 September 2025 and released through DVIDS as image 9317936, VIRIN 250914-F-XP318-1048, public domain. It shows a B-2 Spirit over this stadium at the start of a Chiefs home opener, three years and seven months after the game this entry is about; the videoboard in frame carries the GEHA Field lettering, which is what identifies the building. The DVIDS location field on that record reads Whiteman Air Force Base, which is where the unit is based and not where the photograph was taken.

## Second image

United States Air Force photograph by Airman First Class Thomas Johns, 509th Bomb Wing, 22 September 2019, DVIDS image 5774394, public domain — the same bowl two years and four months before the game, with the sponsor lettering of that period on the ring. Both photographs were made for flyovers and neither shows the play or the overtime described here.