Madness: The Ohio Valley Conference Live Streamed A Coin Flip On Twitter To Determine Which Team Would Receive An Automatic Bid To The FCS Playoffs

Only in college football, folks. Only in college football. What you are reading above is no joke. The Ohio Valley Conference had a tie atop its standings with the regular season in the books. Both Southeast Missouri State and Tennessee Martin were even in first place at 5-0. So, as all leagues and conferences do, there would be a tiebreaker rule in place. 

According to the OVC website, this is the order of operations for settling a tie in the standings...

(a)   A two-way tie shall exist only if the tied teams have the same number of losses.
 
(b)  Should two teams have the same number of losses, and the two teams played each other during the conference season, the winner of the head-to-head contest shall be the league’s postseason representative.
 
(c)  If the two tied teams have the same number of losses, but did not play each other during the conference season, the following procedure shall be utilized to break the tie:
 
    (1)  A comparison of each team’s head-to-head record against the team occupying the highest position in the conference standings that each team has played. If one team won its game, they shall be declared the representative.
 
    (2)  Should the procedure outlined in item 1 fail to break the tie, the process will continue to the next-place team and beyond until the tie is broken.
 
    (3)  When arriving at a group of tied teams that each team has played, composite records between the tying teams shall be utilized to determine if one of the tied teams has won more games against the group of tied teams.
 
    (4)  If the procedures described previously fail to break the tie, the representative shall be determined by a coin flip.

TLDR: there are a ton of steps to attempt to settle a tie between first place teams. None of them were effective in this specific scenario, so there was only one option left... A COIN FLIP!

MADNESS! Just an insane way to determine who will be advancing, but believe it or not, the NFL has similar tiebreakers too (it's not until step 12 in the process). 

Anyways, as you can see in the video above, Southeast Missouri State is heading to the FCS Playoffs thanks to tails actually failing. Congrats to the Redhawks!

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