1y ago

Why bother even having kickoffs?

bleacherreport.com NFL Rule Change Results in Record-Low Kickoff Returns in Week 1 of 2023 Season

NFL kickoff returns are increasingly becoming a thing of the past. Just 20.5 percent of kickoffs were returned in Week 1 action, which is the lowest rate on…

Why bother even having kickoffs if every kick is just going to sail out the endzone with no possibility of a return, or trying to pin the opposition deep? It was bad week 1, and bad again here in week 2.

Just start out from the 25 and be done with kickoffs/returns entirely, instead of this farce. “Stopgap” excuse be damned.

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27 comments

It would be weird to eliminate a large part of the football game that requires a foot and a ball.
- Hypothetically, you could really get rid of all of it. Kickoffs could be 4th and 25 to allow for something like onside kicks. Combine that with a rule that incompletions on 4th down are turnovers at the spot where the ball hits the ground to replace punts and normal kickoffs. Finally, do offseason testing to see what size and configuration of "uprights" (some sort of single Quidditch hoop?) results in quarterbacks roughly matching kickers' percentages on PATs and FGs.
  It would strike us all as being goony AF, but when you get down to it, the kicking specialists are kind of relics anyway, and at this point they mostly serve to add randomness and drama by leveraging "black box" skillsets that none of their teammates possess. It's like, "you as an offense only managed to reach the 'X' yardline so you have only earned a 'Y%' chance at 'Z' yards of field position or 3 points." Kicking and punting are already like a weird minigame, and they could be replaced by one focused on throwing without fundamentally altering the nature of the sport.
  
  Special teams are a core part of the nature of the sport.
  Field position is football.
  
  Field position is football.
  No doubt. I'm just saying the specific biomechanical skillset to manipulate it is very different from the rest of the game and is how it is mostly as a legacy thing. It would be a bit more extreme, but not a world apart from the camp in the soccer world that would like to do away with throw-ins.
  
  So is passing.
  They shouldn't be allowed to legally call it football if they remove the kicking game
  
  Okay, LOL, fair enough. It's a fun thought experiment, but while I wouldn't be as upset as most I'm honestly not particularly invested in my own ideas here.
  Could be interesting for an alt- or minor league that wanted a gimmick and to put their quarterbacks even more front and center.

27 comments