To get up to speed on the dramatic change to NFL kickoffs this season, everyone is in for an education — players, coaches, officials and millions of fans.
With that in mind, “Thursday Night Football” executive producer Fred Gaudelli has gone back to campus.
In advance of an Aug. 22 preseason game between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, Gaudelli has arranged for a high school football team to walk through the various formations and possibilities of the new kickoff in order to get the best camera angles.
“We sat down and drew up a coverage plan,” said Gaudelli, who was working with director Pierre Moossa and producer Mark Teitelman. “We had one way of covering conventional kickoffs. So we’re going to have a totally different way of covering this kickoff. We’re trying to plan for all eventualities. So we’re bringing in a high school team to mimic the kickoffs so we can shoot it and see what works and what doesn’t.”
No ordinary rules tweak, these new kickoffs might be the biggest on-field rules change since the advent of the forward pass.
The new rules put the majority of opposing players much closer together for kickoffs, so they won’t be able to build up a head of steam for those explosive collisions. The ball is kicked from the 35-yard line with 10 kick coverage players assembled on the opposing 40, five on each side of the field.
Those players are within point-blank range of the “set up zone” between the 30- and 35-yard lines, the area where at least nine of the return-team blockers are required to assemble. So almost everyone on the field is gathered in a tight cluster.
That looks strange enough, but it’s even weirder that no one in that area is allowed to move until the kicked ball either hits the ground or is touched by a returner inside the 20.
Old kickoffs looked like cars barreling toward each other in a destruction derby. The new version is like a movie shoot with everyone frozen in place until the director yells, “Action!”
“Millions of people are going to turn on the TV and say, `What the heck is this?’ ” said New Orleans Saints special teams coordinator Darren Rizzi, who was instrumental in the design and implementation of the one-season rules change.
The adjustment was made to make kickoffs safer and breathe new life into a play that essentially had been abandoned. The 2023 season saw the lowest kickoff return rate in NFL history.
This year’s showdown between Kansas City and San Francisco was the first Super Bowl in history with zero kickoff returns.
Behind the scenes, league experts were working on a solution — a blueprint for making kickoffs relevant again and revitalizing what once was the game’s most exciting play.
“We’re in the business of creating an entertaining product, putting a product on the field where you can be competitive in every moment,” said Atlanta Falcons president Rich McKay, chairman of the NFL’s competition committee. “And we’ve created a play that’s no longer competitive. Our job as a league, as a membership, is to try to find a way to make that play competitive. This was our best option.”
In 2018, a group of special teams coaches convened in New York for a traditional offseason meeting in which they talked over rules, statistical changes, injury rates and the like. Then, they turned to kickoffs.
“That’s when we did a deep dive on all the leagues,” said Rizzi, who along with Dallas Cowboys special teams coordinator John Fassel presented the proposed new kickoff to owners at the league meetings in March. “We said, `Let’s look at the CFL. Let’s look at the XFL. Let’s look at the USFL. Let’s look at anybody that had a kickoff and try to pull the best ideas and try to make this the safest and most exciting play possible.’”
What emerged was a version of the XFL kickoffs, but not an identical copy. Whereas the XFL has a single returner, the NFL allows for two. And the NFL did not adopt the XFL rule that everyone can begin moving once the kicked ball has been on the ground for three seconds.
“What you saw in the XFL was there were a lot of kickoffs that landed on the ground,” Rizzi said. “We’re trying to avoid that, trying to avoid sloppy play. So the ability to have two guys back and kind of split the field, gives us a chance to field every ball.”
The XFL, which merged with the USFL after the 2023 season, had the kicking team line up on the 35. The NFL is five yards back, at the 40.
Otherwise, the general concept of the kickoffs is the same, and those were unveiled in last weekend’s weather-shortened Hall of Fame game.
Thursday marks the start of preseason games across the league, although the expectation is that teams aren’t going to tip their hand if they have any tricky kickoff plays in mind. Best to keep the preseason as vanilla as possible.
Rest assured, though, every special teams coach is trying to find new ways to get a jump on the competition and keep ahead of the curve, the way the Philadelphia Eagles mastered the short-yardage “Brotherly Shove.”
“I think everyone, especially early on, is going to try to have an idea that somebody hasn’t thought about that they could take advantage of,” Rizzi said. “And listen, it might be as simple as a blocking scheme because we’ve never had to block in this.”
Because the vast majority of players cannot move until the kicked ball lands — either in the hands of the returner or on the ground — hang time is no longer relevant. Particularly important now is the accuracy of the kickers, who will be asked to land the ball in specific spots, the way golfers control pitching wedges.
For that reason, Rizzi said, it’s unlikely teams will use a position player — for instance, a safety — to kick off, even though that would give them another sure tackler on the back end.
Cinque Sweeting, among the XFL’s top kick returners last season, said there’s ample opportunity to tear off a big return for players who can run around or through the first line of defense.
“I’m a big believer that I can’t let the kicker tackle me,” said Sweeting, a Vegas Vipers returner who ranked third in the XFL last season with an average return of 23.4 yards. “That’s the thing with this new return, a lot of kickers are going to have to buckle up their chin strap and really squeeze the space between the second level and the return.
“It’s going to be interesting to see what kicker is going to be good at doing it, because they’re definitely going to have to make some tackles during the season.”
Sweeting, whose first name is pronounced SIN-cue, is playing in Austria and hopes that the new kickoffs might afford him an opportunity to realize his NFL dream, considering he was so dangerous in the XFL.
What’s more, he’s convinced NFL fans will love the change.
“Usually during kickoffs a lot of people are expecting the ball to be a touchback,” he said. “They’re going to get snacks from the concession stand or things like that. So I think this is going to make more people be glued to their TV during all aspects of the game.”
