Unless it's a playoff game (where, by necessity, one team needs to move on to the next round), professional football should consider repealing its frivolous and arbitrary "overtime" period, and return to the purity of tie games.
Not only is there no shame in a tie, there is an elegance and logic to it. Two professional football teams play their hearts out for 60 minutes on a Sunday afternoon and, once the dust has settled, demonstrate that they are (at least on this one day) equally matched. What's so fundamentally distasteful about that?
As for college football, I have no opinion either way, as I rarely watch it. If a college audience honestly believes that tie games are unfulfilling or "undignified," and that it's more desirable to have interminably long and repetitive overtime games, artificially set up at one end of the field and leading to scores like 59-52, that's their business.
But the NFL needs to rethink it. Ties are not only permitted in soccer, hockey and boxing (where they are referred to as "draws"), they were an integral part of football all the way up to 1974, at which time the networks (with football having become a monster ratings phenomenon) pressured the NFL into sexing up the game by giving it a decided "take no prisoners" flavor. Indeed, ties weren't allowed in Rome's gladiatorial arenas.
One cool thing about ties is that, while they may not give a prohibitive underdog a greater chance of winning, they do give it a greater chance of "not losing," because the longer two teams are forced to play, the better chance the superior team (with more talent and a deeper bench) has of winning.
Consider: A 14-point underdog being able to tie the prohibitive favorite is a notable achievement, something which the underdog's fans can rejoice in and be proud of. But playing for 60 grueling minutes, and managing to scrape out a tie, but then getting beaten in overtime, amounts to little more than a footnote. Yes, it went to overtime, but the favorite still gets the "W" and the 'dog gets the "L."
Also, consider this: Even though the NFL abhors ties, it doesn't abhor them enough to outlaw them (and adopt a "sudden death" format). If teams remain tied after the obligatory OT period, the game goes into the books as a tie. Since 1974, there have been 20 games that have ended in ties after "five" periods. If ties are perfectly acceptable after five periods, what makes them philosophically unacceptable after a regulation four periods?
And at the risk of political ideology raising its ugly head, isn't the "no tie" rule a bit too reminiscent of Karl Marx's depiction of unfettered capitalism, where the economic landscape is presented as a form of "warfare," one that necessitates winners and losers, exploiters and victims, surfers and ho-dads?
Or if the Marxian dialectic is too scary, how about a simple appeal to parenthood? When two tiny kids bring their just-completed drawings of a cow standing in front of a barn to Mommy, and ask her which one she "likes better," what is Mommy supposed to say?
Should Mommy be allowed to tell her kids that because she thinks both drawings are wonderful, she can't really pick one over the other because she likes both of them equally? Should she be allowed to award a "tie"? Or do we insist she pick a winner, because America demands it?