Pittsburgh Steelers kicker Jeff Reed kicks the ball off in the old rule format. PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Ben Staker
Sports Editor
This year’s NFL season brought drastic changes to the kickoff rules and I’m not sure that I like it. To give you some context, the team kicking the ball off used to have their kicker and other ten players lined up on their own 35-yard line. As for the receiving team, their first line of players started on the 50-yard line and every five to ten yards there was another line of players until you got back to the returners.
When the ball was kicked off, all players on the field could move freely until the play was blown dead by a referee.
With the new rules, the kicker is the only player on his team’s 35-yard line. The other ten players are now required to start at the other team’s 40-yard line. The receiving team is allowed to have two designated players return the kicks. The other nine players now line up on their own team’s 30 and 35-yard line.
These aren’t the only changes with the kickoff though. The area between the returning team’s 20 and one-yard line has now been deemed the “ landing zone.” The ball either has to land in this zone, the end zone, or go through the back of the end zone for a touchback. If the kicker fails to do this, there will be an automatic penalty and the receiving team will start their offensive drive at their own 40-yard line.
The last big change with the kickoff is that no one on the field can move until the returning team initially gains possession of the ball or it touches the “landing zone.”
According to the NFL Football Operations website, the new rules are being called the “dynamic kickoff.” The reasoning for the rule change was to prevent injuries and promote more teams to return kickoffs following a historically low percentage of kickoff returns last season.
So why am I not a fan of this? Besides the injuries part, the changes don’t make a lot of sense to me. Everything seems to be unfairly in the returning team’s favor. In just week one, we already saw the Arizona Cardinals’ returner, DeeJay Dallas, return a kick for a touchdown, along with many other “dynamic” returns across the league.
I think seeing players have such an advantage on the kickoff returns trashes the amount of talent it used to take to return kicks. Imagine players like Devin Hester or Jacoby Jones with these rules. Records are going to be broken and it’s going to make these guys return stats look worse than they really are.
Call me a football boomer if you want, but my initial impression of the “dynamic kickoff” is that it’s clearly not for me.