“Winning isn’t everything, but it’s the only thing. In our business there is no second place. Either you’re first or you’re last.”

Or it’s the NFL in 2018 and you tie a few times – with surely more to come.

Imagine Vince Lombardi, who popularized the “winning is the only thing” ideology, absorbing today’s NFL reality. A world where Indianapolis Colts coach Frank Reich was presented with a scenario last week that made it more mathematically attractive to play it safe and tie rather than play it risky and lose. Reich chose the latter and went down in flames with some Lombardi-like bravado, which apparently counts for something more than percentage points at the end of a season.

Did I like Reich’s decision? No. But there is something I hated even worse: that the NFL incentivized Reich choosing a stalemate. This is what the NFL has become in 2018, a league that shortened overtime largely to protect the viability of “Thursday Night Football” (we’ll get to that in a bit) and made ties more attractive and more inevitable.

View photos Steelers linebacker T.J. Watt celebrates a blocked field goal in overtime against the Browns. The season opener between the AFC North rivals ended in a draw. (Getty Images) More

You want a real product problem in the league today? Well guess what? This one is far more problematic than player protests. It’s more mind-numbing than the overbearing protectionism of quarterbacks. It’s even worse than the rampant over-officiating of the leading-with-the helmet rule, which I still believe was quashed via a secret-handshake Illuminati meeting in August.

The league white-knuckled over all those other issues, but thus far, it’s saying little about one that should matter more: overtime.

We’ve had two overtime ties and two more near-ties in a total of six overtime games. And all of this in only four weeks. That’s a problem. And with the extra frame being shortened from 15 minutes to 10 in 2017, it’s going to get worse.

There’s a basic product issue here that the league should be apologizing for. Think of the millions of dollars that four fanbases spent to watch a pair of draws this season: the 21-21 dud between the Cleveland Browns and Pittsburgh Steelers in Week 1; and the ungratifying 29-29 knot between the Green Bay Packers and Minnesota Vikings in Week 2.

Fans travel for those games. They shell out large sums of money. They invest time and emotion. The players, coaches and personnel staffs cram untold hours into preparation – only to be followed by unparalleled physical violence – that culminates in, well, a whole of nothing. The upside is a half-game percentage bump for two franchises and an awkward emotional purgatory for hundreds of thousands of consumers.

All of this might be easier to swallow if it rarely happened. But the truth is the league is one more tie away this season from having to address this as a self-created crisis. Since sudden-death was instituted in 1974, the NFL has never had three games end in a tie during one season. This season, it already has two and a pair of near-misses in six overtime games.

Beyond the general malaise that ties create for overall NFL fans – a diverse group of people that also appears universally united against ties, by the way – the league also has to be concerned how the five-minute overtime shortening has played out. This is already in worst-case scenario territory.

View photos Andrew Luck defended Frank Reich’s overtime decision to go for it on fourth-and-4. (Getty Images) More

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