How Ties Count in the NFL Standings

By 4Football Staff · October 24, 2026 · 11 min read

A tie is not a loss and not quite a win. Here is how the NFL turns a deadlocked game into half a win, why it matters for playoff races, and where ties show up in tiebreakers.

You open the standings and see a record that looks wrong: 9-7-1. Seventeen games, but the first two numbers add up to sixteen. The third number is a tie, and it raises a fair question. If a team plays a game and neither side wins, what exactly does that do to its place in the table?

The answer is simple in principle and surprisingly consequential in practice. A tie counts as half a win and half a loss. That one rule decides how teams are sorted, how tiebreakers are applied, and sometimes who gets a home playoff game. This article walks through where ties come from, how the math works, and how a tie interacts with the National Football League (NFL) tiebreaking procedures.

Where a tie comes from

In the NFL regular season, a game that is level at the end of the fourth quarter goes to overtime. Overtime is a single period of limited length, and the exact procedure for who gets the ball and when the game can end has been revised more than once. The length of the period has also changed over the decades. Because those details move, the best place to confirm today's version is the league's current rulebook, and our longer explainer on how overtime works at the NFL, college and high school levels covers the mechanics.

What matters for standings is the end of the process. If the overtime period expires and the score is still level, the game stops and goes into the books as a tie. There is no second overtime period in the regular season and no shootout of any kind. Both teams are credited with a tie.

That is different from the postseason, where a tie is not allowed. Playoff games continue through as many overtime periods as it takes to produce a winner, because a bracket needs one team to advance. So ties are purely a regular-season phenomenon, and they are rare, because overtime gives most deadlocked games a chance to end with a winner.

A short history of the tie

Ties were far more common in the league's early decades, when there was no overtime at all in regular-season play. Regular-season overtime arrived in 1974, and ties became much less frequent from then on. They did not disappear, though, and a season with one or two ties is not unusual.

The way the standings treated them changed too. In the early years of the league, a tie was effectively ignored when winning percentage was calculated, as if the game had not been played. Beginning in 1972, the league switched to the method still used today, counting a tie as half a win and half a loss. If you ever read historical standings from the early decades of the league, expect some percentages to have been computed differently from today's.

The arithmetic

Winning percentage is the number used to sort teams. Under the modern method:

• A win counts as 1.
• A tie counts as 0.5.
• A loss counts as 0.
• Winning percentage is the total of those values divided by games played.

So a team that finishes 9-7-1 has 9.5 "win units" in 17 games, which is 9.5 divided by 17, or about .559. The tie is worth exactly half of what a win is worth, and it is also exactly half as damaging as a loss.

Here is a table of hypothetical final records in a 17-game season, so you can see how ties slot in among the wins and losses.

Notice a few things. A 10-6-1 team ranks above a 10-7 team even though both have ten wins, because the tie is better than a loss. It ranks below an 11-6 team, because the tie is worse than a win. And an 8-8-1 team lands at exactly .500, the dividing line between a winning and a losing season, which is a quirk of a 17-game schedule: the only way to finish at precisely .500 is to include an odd number of ties.

Different records, same percentage

Because a tie is half a win, two teams can have different-looking records and identical winning percentages. Imagine one team finishes 10-7 and another finishes 9-6-2. The second team has nine wins plus two half-wins, which is ten win units across 17 games. Both teams are at .588.

When that happens, the standings do not call it a tie in the sense of a drawn game. They call it a tie in the standings, and the league moves to its tiebreaking procedures to decide who ranks higher. The same thing happens with 9-8 and 8-7-2, both at .529. This is one reason the word "tie" is overloaded in football: it can mean a drawn game, or two teams level in the table. Context makes the difference clear, but it is worth keeping the two meanings separate in your head.

Ties and the playoff race

The practical effect of a tie is that it changes the cost-benefit of results in a close race. A tie is a better result than a loss for the team that would have lost, and a worse result than a win for the team that would have won. In a division race decided by a game or two, that half a win can be the whole margin.

Think about two hypothetical division rivals who each finish with one more win than the other would need to catch up. If Team A ends 10-6-1 and Team B ends 10-7, Team A wins the division on winning percentage alone, and no tiebreaker is needed. Had that Team A game ended in a loss instead, the two would have finished at 10-7 each and the league would have turned to the head-to-head result, then division record, and so on down the list.

That is also why a tie can feel flat to the people involved. For a team that was favored, a tie is a half-win short of what it wanted. For a team that was an underdog, it is a half-win better than the loss it might have taken. Both feelings are accurate, because the table really does move by half a win in each direction. How coaches manage the clock when a game is level is a separate subject, covered in our piece on the two-minute drill.

What a tie does not do

A tie game does not give either team a bonus beyond the half-win credit. It also does not break records in any other way: the score is entered like any other result, and points scored and allowed for both teams reflect what happened on the field. A team is not penalized in the standings for a tie beyond the lost half win.

How tiebreakers handle ties

When two or more teams finish level, the league applies its ordered list of tiebreakers. That list, with its different versions for division races and wild-card races, is laid out in our guide to how NFL tiebreakers work. What follows is how a drawn game feeds into each step, because the lists are written in terms of winning percentage, and winning percentage includes ties.

Head-to-head

The first step compares the results of games between the tied teams. A tie between them counts as half a win for each. If two teams play twice and each wins once, the head-to-head percentage is .500 for both and the step does not separate them. The same is true if two teams play once and the game is a tie: both sit at .500 in the head-to-head, and the procedure moves to the next step.

If a team has one win and one tie against a rival, its head-to-head record is 1-0-1, which is .750, and it wins the step. A single drawn game is not enough to decide a tiebreaker on its own, but it can combine with another result to do so.

Division record, conference record and common games

The next steps compare winning percentage in division games, conference games, or games against shared opponents. All of them count ties as half a win. If a team tied a division opponent, its division record might read 4-1-1, which converts to about .750. A rival at 4-2 sits at .667, so the tie made the difference.

Common games has an extra wrinkle that does not involve ties: it applies only when teams share a minimum number of opponents, a number that depends on the type of tiebreaker. The point to remember is that ties inside those shared games carry the same half-win value as in the overall record.

Strength of victory and strength of schedule

Strength of victory is the combined winning percentage of the teams you beat. A team you tied is not a team you beat, so that opponent does not enter the strength-of-victory calculation. The opponent still counts toward strength of schedule, which looks at all of the opponents you played. In both measures, the opponents' own records are measured using the half-win convention, so an opponent who finished 9-7-1 is treated as having a .559 record.

This is one of the areas where a tie quietly matters. A tie against a good team does not boost your strength of victory, but it also does not leave your strength of schedule untouched, since that team still counts as a played opponent.

The points-based steps

Further down the list, the procedures compare rankings in points scored and allowed, net points, and net touchdowns. Those steps do not care about the result of a game, only about the points. A tied game contributes the same points to each side, so it adds equally to the points scored and points allowed columns for both teams and contributes a net of zero in net-points steps. If the league ever reaches those steps, the tie is not a factor in any special way.

Reading ties in the standings

When you check the NFL standings, the record is usually shown as wins, losses and ties in that order. Some publications drop the third number when it is zero, so you may see 10-7 in one place and 10-7-0 in another. The percentage column is usually the thing the table is sorted by, so a 9-7-1 team will sit between a 10-7 team and a 9-8 team, as in the earlier table. Our standings are simplified, so check the league's official standings when a race is close enough that the full tiebreaker list matters.

Here are some tips for reading a record with a tie:

• Count the three numbers. In a 17-game season they add to 17 once every game is played.
• Add half a win for each tie. That gives you the number the table is really using.
• Compare teams by percentage, not by raw win count. A team with fewer wins can be ahead.
• Remember that "percentage" in these tables is displayed as three decimals, so very close teams can look identical when they are not.

A common mistake

A frequent error is treating a tie as if it did not count, which is how the oldest standings worked and how some casual conversations still treat it. In today's NFL, ignoring the tie will give you the wrong order. Drop the tie from a 9-7-1 record and you get 9-7, which is .563 over sixteen games, slightly higher than the true .559. The gap is small here, but in a tight race it is enough to flip two teams.

A second mistake is treating a tie as half a game. It is a full game played, so the team has played 17 games in the example above, not 16.5. The half only applies to the win credit.

Ties at other levels

The NFL's treatment is not the same everywhere in football, and a reader following high school or college teams should know the differences.

• College football. Division I college football eliminated ties in the mid-1990s by adopting an overtime procedure that continues until one team leads. A tie cannot happen in a college regular-season game, so the issue does not arise in college standings. Check each conference's rules for how it breaks ties in the table.
• High school football. Rules differ by state association. Many states use an overtime format that guarantees a winner. Some leagues or states allow ties in certain situations, such as weather-shortened games or games under a running-clock rule, and each state or league sets how it counts them. If your local standings include a tie, check your state association or league office for how to treat it.
• Youth and recreational football. Ties are common in some leagues that play fixed-length games with no overtime. Leagues may count a tie as half a win or may use a points system with its own values. The league handbook is the authority.

The take-away is that the half-win convention is an NFL rule, not a law of football. When you look at records from other levels, check how the league counts a tie before comparing teams.

Why the half-win method makes sense

Counting a tie as half a win is not the only possible method, but it has good properties. It treats a team that earns a draw as better than a team that loses, and worse than a team that wins, which is the ordering most fans expect. It keeps the denominator equal to the number of games played, which means every team's percentage is comparable. And it is symmetric: both sides of a tie receive the same credit, so the total of all win units in the league equals the total number of games, whatever the number of ties.

Alternatives exist in other sports. Some leagues award two points for a win, one for a draw and none for a loss, and sort by points. In soccer, three points for a win and one for a draw is standard. The NFL's method gives a different feeling to the tie, because it is wrapped into a single percentage, but it produces the same logical ordering when every team plays the same number of games, which the league's schedule ensures.

The short version

• A tie is a regular-season result when overtime ends level; playoff games must produce a winner.
• A tie counts as half a win and half a loss in winning percentage, a rule the NFL has used since 1972.
• Winning percentage is win units (wins plus half the ties) divided by games played.
• Different records can produce the same percentage, such as 10-7 and 9-6-2, and then tiebreakers apply.
• A tie between two teams counts as a half win for each in head-to-head, division and conference records.
• A team you tied is not a team you beat, so it does not count toward strength of victory, though it does count toward strength of schedule.
• Check how a league counts ties before comparing teams at the college, high school or youth level; the half-win rule is the NFL's own.
• For the full ordered list of procedures and how the playoff field is built, see how the NFL playoff bracket and seeding work, and check the schedule and scores pages for results as they come in.