Justice flips out

Maybe you’re suffering fatigue from the NFL season, which apparently started in the Eisenhower administration and is at last coming up to the ultra-exciting bye week before the Super Bowl.

Or maybe you’re like me. Maybe you can’t get enough of the No Fun League.

I’d be even more excited if a few of the rules made sense.

Take Sunday in the National Conference title game. The Minnesota Vikings lost to the Hurricane Katrina Saints 31-28 in overtime. The win propelled New Orleans to a Super Bowl date with the Indianapolis Colts and the Vikings to a winter of playing golf.

Not in Minnesota, mind you. An El Nino winter there means temperatures occasionally climbing above zero. I know. I once survived Minnesota.

It’s no coincidence Minnesota’s uniform is the color of sour grapes. The Vikings lost to the Saints in a game decided by a dramatic coin flip.

Sure, 99-year-old quarterback Brett Favre (pronounced Wicket) threw the worst pass of his career to end the fourth quarter and squander the chance for a Viking field goal and victory.

Then came the coin flip. As often happens in the No Fun League, the team winning the flip takes the ball and marches down the field. Then it sends out a 5-foot-3, 98-pound kicker. The announcers, in voices deep enough to seem to be emanating from the Mariana Trench, say the kicker is not a kicker but a football player.

The “football player,” often from some place like Greenland, boots the ball through the uprights to win the game.

If the NFL Rules Committee didn’t move as slow as erosion, or have the common sense of broccoli, it would adopt the college and high school overtime system.

There, when a game reaches overtime, each team gets one possession from its opponent’s 25-yard line. The team leading after both possessions is the winner.

If the game is still tied, overtime continues.

Starting with the third overtime, a one-point kick after a touchdown is forbidden. This forces teams to go for two points by running, passing, praying — or sometimes all three.

The NFL overtime, by contrast, is decided by a 15-minute sudden-death quarter. Often this means sudden death for the team losing the coin flip.

My advice to the Vikings? Forget about golf. Go practice calling heads or tails.

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