usatsi-travis-kelce-cbs.jpg
USATSI

The Super Bowl LVIII matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers became just the second Super Bowl to go to overtime, and the extra period came with a twist. Under the NFL's new postseason overtime rules, both teams get a chance to possess the ball, which gave different meaning to the coin toss.

In your usual sudden-death overtime, teams want to win the coin toss and elect to receive -- to have the opportunity to end the game with a touchdown. In this new format, however, the team that plays defense first gets a chance to possess the ball as well, no matter if the first team scores a touchdown or not. 

The 49ers won the overtime coin toss on Super Bowl Sunday, and head coach Kyle Shanahan elected to receive -- to the surprise of many. You can see the surprise on Patrick Mahomes' face when it happened.

San Francisco marched 66 yards down the field on 13 plays, and settled for a 27-yard Jake Moody field goal. The Chiefs then needed a touchdown to win the game, and that's exactly what they accomplished, going 75 yards down the field on 13 plays while Mecole Hardman caught the game-winning score. 

On their "New Heights" podcast, Jason Kelce and Travis Kelce discussed Shanahan's controversial decision, with Jason pointing out that in this format, deferring gives you the advantage of knowing what your offense will need to accomplish on that second drive to win the game. Travis agreed.

"You win the coin toss, that's what you get. You get the opportunity to have the advantage," Travis said. "And they handed it right over to us."

To make matters worse, multiple 49ers players admitted after the fact that they did not know the overtime protocol. As for why Shanahan would want the ball first in this format, if the Chiefs and 49ers scored the same amount of points on their first drives, the 49ers would get the ball on the third drive, which would be sudden death. Then again, if the 49ers scored a touchdown and extra point on that first possession instead of a field goal, Mahomes said the Chiefs would have just gone for two on their possession. 

"It's just something we talked about," Shanahan said in his postgame press conference. "None of us have a ton of experience with [the new overtime rules]. But we went through all the analytics and talked to those guys. We just thought it would be better. We wanted the ball third. If both teams matched and scored, we wanted to be the ones who had the chance to go win. So got that field goal, so knew we had to hold them to at least a field goal and if we did, we thought it was in our hands after that."