THERE ARE NO GRANDMASTER DRAWS IN FOOTBALL.

For the first time, the National Football League offered a seventeen game season.  I still suspect that such a long season is ultimately going to lead to more career-shortening injuries, although its length is also allowing players who are injured early in the season to return to play for the stretch drive and in some cases the playoffs.

The idea of professional football spilling over into the new year still bothers me.  New Year's Day is for the college bowl games, except when that's a Sunday, and the "national championship" ought be for fans to argue about, not reduced to an algorithm.  The last time a professional football season ended on December 31 was the Ice Bowl in Green Bay.

All carping aside, the final day of the regular season was a good one for couch potatoes. "Every single television window for 12 hours on Sunday was chock full of drama."

Right to the final gun.  Because of the way the schedule worked out, when Pittsburgh defeated Indianapolis (a contest of two teams that were in the National Football League in the Lombardi era) the Oakland Los Angeles Las Vegas Raiders and the San Diego Los Angeles Chargers were in a position to secure their division three spots in the playoffs by playing to a tie.

The Soviet team in an International Chess Olympiad would know what to do.  "A grandmaster draw refers to when players engage in a short, effectively uncontested game, often in the last round of a tournament, and then agree to a draw."  If you're a club-level player, that might not be a big deal, but if you're Bobby Fischer captaining the United States team, or a Steelers fan, it is.  "To summarize: this fish does not give a damn what the sharks do or do not do to one another. I've enough to worry about swimming upstream!"

In that final game, both the Raiders and the Chargers made every effort to knock the other team out.  In the concluding minutes, the Chargers had to score a touchdown to force overtime, and that was a grindingly slow drive with lots of incomplete passes, and several fourth down conversions.  In the overtime, each team kicked a field goal.  Under the new overtime rules, it's only sudden victory with the first touchdown.  Former Los Angeles had the final drive of the game.  They seemed interested in the grandmaster draw until Current Los Angeles called a time out on third down with Former Los Angeles just out of field goal range.  That seemed to fire up Former Los Angeles, so they converted the third down, getting into field goal range, and kicking the field goal.  There might have been more cheering in Pittsburgh than in Las Vegas.