ORLANDO — The NFL passed a new hybrid kickoff rule on Tuesday to try to save a play that has slipped into irrelevance.
Special teams coaches led the charge to study, tweak and adopt last season’s XFL kickoff rules on a one-year trial basis to encourage more returns.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell spearheaded a surge toward the rule’s 29-3 vote passage coming off a season when only 22% of kicks were returned and there were 1,970 touchbacks and 92 fair catches.
Those statistics were an unintended consequence of the league adding fair catches last year and discouraging returns for player safety purposes due to the old kickoff’s high injury risk.
“Roger didn’t like the touchbacks,” one coach said Tuesday. “It makes the product look bad.”
So the new hybrid kickoff setup is structured to encourage more returns and action, while eliminating the downfield sprint for coverage teams that creates the biggest collisions.
“On behalf of all the special teams coaches, we feel this is a great day for the NFL,” New Orleans Saints special teams coordinator Darren Rizzi said Tuesday. “We’ve taken a play that’s essentially been dying, and in our opinion we’ve revived it.
“Even if we get to a 50% return rate in year one with this hybrid kickoff, we’re bringing back about 1,000 plays back into the fold,” Rizzi added. “This is gonna be must-see TV, because it’s going to be brand new to everybody. Whether you like it or don’t like it, you’re gonna watch it.”
The new kickoff setup will pack at least 19 of the 22 players on the field within 10 yards of each other to start on the receiving team’s side of the field.
Ten of the kicking team players will line up on the receiving team’s 40-yard line. The receiving team can put nine or 10 players in a “set-up zone” between its 30 and 35 yard lines — with a minimum of seven on the 35 exactly — and up to two players in the “landing zone” between the goal line and the 20.
And none of those 19 or 20 players on the 40 or in the set-up zone are allowed to move until the ball is caught by a returner or hits the ground.
The kicker will kick the ball off from the opposite 35, but he will be incentivized to keep the kick in play: Touchbacks will give the offense the ball to start its drive on the 30-yard line now, and any kick that lands short of the 20 will be automatically spotted at the 40.
“The kickoff returner value is gonna skyrocket because of the amount of times that guy’s gonna have his hands on the ball,” Dallas Cowboys special teams coordinator John Fassel said.
To reinforce Fassel’s point, the Pittsburgh Steelers reached an agreement with returner Cordarrelle Patterson on a two-year contract only hours after the rule passed.
“Do we believe there will be a lot more big plays? Absolutely,” Rizzi said.
This rule is seemingly going to help offenses, too, not just return units.
Fassel said the coaches are projecting through their research that offenses will start drives on the 30-yard line or better on 40% of their drives this coming season.
The NFL is projecting offenses to start drives around the 28 or 29-yard line on average, which would be a three- or four-yard increase from last year’s 25.2-yard line average starting spot. The XFL’s average was at the 29.1-yard line last year.
Special teams coaches will be pouring over new strategies between now and Week 1 of the regular season, though, looking for an edge in both the coverage and return elements of this new hybrid kickoff.
So the Daily News talked to more coaches to take a closer look at how this play could develop and evolve:
WHAT IF WE DON’T USE A KICKER?
The kicker is the only player allowed to get a running start downfield in coverage. So one head coach posited that some teams might try to find a safety or corner who can kick capably so that they have 11 true tacklers on the field.
There is one catch, though: the kicker is not allowed to cross the 50-yard line until the ball hits the ground or is caught. Plus, the kick still has to sail a minimum of 45 yards to reach the landing zone. So some others were skeptical that removing the kicker altogether would work.
“The ball is far enough back that it still has to be a viable kick,” one special teams coordinator said. “If you have a [player like Chiefs safety] Justin Reid or something, that’s different.”
A team like the Giants with an athletic kicker in Graham Gano theoretically could run him downfield as a coverage weapon, too. But injury risk to a key player like that probably isn’t worth it.
“Most people wouldn’t do it because you don’t want to get your kicker injured,” said Anthony Blevins, the former Las Vegas Vipers XFL head coach and Giants assistant. “For the Giants, there’s no way you want to get Graham injured because once you get on that kicker train, you have no idea who you’re gonna get. You’re playing Russian roulette.”
Fassel said that while “it looks strange with basically everybody starting offsides, once the ball is caught by the returner, it’s really a similar play.” So the strategic adjustments might not have to be so drastic.
TWO IS BETTER THAN ONE
The XFL only allowed one return man in the landing zone while using this hybrid kickoff last season. Blevins said that resulted in a lot of single blocks and not a ton of options in the scheme. So at a meeting last July, the XFL head coaches discussed allowing a second returner.
“Two guys back creates some potential reverses, more scheme,” Blevins said, which gives coaches more options and adds excitement.
There are opportunities to bust open a big play, too, due to how closely the coverage team is forced to align to the return team.
“What happens on the coverage end is the coverage isn’t layered,” Blevins said. “Everybody’s on the same plane, the blockers and the cover guys. Everything happens so fast and it’s on the same plane, so one missed tackle and it can be out of the gate. The return people are right there. There’s no angles for blocks.”
A head coach said one way to cover more safely might be to loop a couple of the coverage players off the 40-yard line behind their teammates or create a sort of zone rather than letting the return team create a man-to-man situation that favors them.
Fassel said the reduced chance of a damaging collision emboldens the returners, as well, though, from what he observed on the XFL tape.
“From a kickoff return perspective, there’s a lot more confidence gained that this cover guy’s only five yards away from me, so the impact from this collision’s gonna be a little bit lower,” Fassel said. “And my success rate is probably gonna go up because it’s a little tighter quarters.”
NO MORE SURPRISE ONSIDES KICKS
Teams will not be allowed to do a surprise onside kick anymore under the new hybrid kickoff rule. They may only declare an onside kick to the officials from the start of the fourth quarter on. Rizzi admitted this limit on onside kicks could evolve in the future, but he said there were only two onside kicks attempted last year, there have been less than four over the last five years and teams have succeeded on just two of the last 15 attempts league-wide.
SAVING SPECIAL TEAMS
One special teams coordinator reiterated that the whole point of this rule was to “make the play relevant” again.
“When teams have to cut practice short, they cut special teams periods first,” he said. “When they have to trim the roster, they cut a specialist first.” And now the kickoff was dying on top of that.
This was affecting the game and it was impacting careers. Something had to give.
“It was an irrelevant play,” he said. “Especially when you were playing in the South or in a dome, you’d just kick it out of the back of the end zone and that would be it. Now it’s a viable play that will have an impact on the game.”
