The NFL adopted three rules changes Monday, including banning the swivel hip drop tackle. They did not vote on the kickoff proposal.
But they still could.
“Do I think we could vote on it tomorrow? Yes, it’s possible,” Competition Committee chairman Rich McKay said Monday. “Or we could wait and vote on it in May. I like voting on it sooner rather than later because there’s no question that the play, by bringing the play back in — we had 1,970 touchbacks last season — so if you bring the play back in, let’s just say 1,200 [of those] become returns. The person you are going to have as your returner is going to matter, and we do have the draft coming up and we do have college free agency coming up. So, I think personnel people need to know is this play going to be in or out. That would lead me to want to have the vote sooner, but we’ll wait and see.”
Some of the league’s special teams coaches worked up a proposal that uses an XFL-style kickoff. Everyone but the kicker would line up in the receiving team’s territory in order to avoid the high-speed collisions that come with the traditional kickoff.
The NFL tweaked the XFL’s kickoff rule, allowing teams to employ two returners and giving teams three different kinds of touchbacks. The receiving team will start at its own 40 if the kickoff doesn’t make it past the return team’s 20-yard line; the receiving team will start at the 30 if the ball is kicked into or out of the end zone; and the receiving team will start at the 20 if the ball hits the ground in the “landing zone” and rolls into the end zone.
“This is a major change, and it looks new to people,” McKay said. “Some people say, ‘Boy, it’s complicated.’ I would say to you that this has been worked on for a number of years, so probably for those of us that have been working on it, it probably doesn’t feel that way, so I think there’s a time element here, an explanation element to the play.”
It is non-traditional, so it does face opposition, including from some special teams coaches.
“I think people ask the question: What if we don’t anticipate something and it goes south? We’ve got issues. We’ve got whatever,” McKay said. “I think part of the comeback to that is: We’ve seen this play. We’ve got two years of this play at full speed. Yes, they’re not NFL athletes, but they’re pretty good athletes. And, yes, we’ve tweaked the play, but we think we’ve tweaked it in a way that makes it better from a strategy standpoint, but I think it’s the idea of: If we go all the way in, and if something happens, what would be do? I think there’s that fear. That’s always going to be the fear of change. We get that.
“We have to start somewhere, and we like the three years of work we did to get to this point, but I do think it’s the fear of the unknown.”
The NFL tried a one-year trial last season, allowing teams to fair catch a kickoff for a starting position at the 25-yard line. Kickoff returns set a modern-day low with only 22 percent returned. Twelve of the 13 kickoffs in the Super Bowl landed out of the end zone, and the other wasn’t returned.
Twenty-three percent of kickoffs during the regular season went through the end zone.
The league is trying to strike a balance between an “acceptable injury rate” closer to the injury rate on scrimmage plays while encouraging more kickoff returns. The goal is a return rate in the 36-38 percent range.
The question now is: Does the rule have 24 owners who will vote in favor of it to enact it for 2024? Tuesday could provide the answer.
