At the Risk of Sounding UnAmerican, I Don't Hate the NFL's New Kickoff Rules
Change is hard. By its very nature, it's a disruption. It requires adjustment. It seems as though every part of our culture had a certain peak that was diminished by the human incapability to leave well enough alone. Architecture has never been better than it was in the 1930s. Cars have never been more stylish than they were in the late '60s. (If you try to argue the point, I'll checkmate you with the 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback Steve McQueen raced through San Francisco in Bullitt, and you'll have no answer for it.) Movies reached their zenith in the '80s. The Golden Age of TV was from roughly 2000 to the next-to-last season of Game of Thrones, and so on. The point being, in all things there comes a time when you wish you could hit the great, cosmic pause button and keep everything the same forever. But you have to accept change will happen, and that thing you thought was perfect as is will decline.
That goes double for pro football. The powers that be took a league that had achieved near perfection, and they meddled with it. They added the watered down product that is Thursday Night Football. Lengthened the season. Expanded the playoffs. And wrote an endless series of confounding, incomprehensible, overly enforced rules that made it impossible for the public to understand a matter as basic as the definition of the word "catch."
Admittedly, the kickoff rule that debuted at the Hall of Fame Game is just the latest. My default setting will always be to prefer rules that any idiot can understand. The reason being that I'm an idiot and don't want to have to solve Fermat's Last Theorem just to know what's happening. But this is how they're explaining how a kickoff works now:
If you have to use Nintendo Wii graphics and draw green rectangles around different parts of the field - in fact, if it takes more than two sentences to explain - then it stops being a game that's been played since the 19th century and starts becoming Squid Games. And purely from an aesthetic point of view, looks like the Monty Python reenactment of Pearl Harbor:
But at the risk of contradicting everything I've just said, as well as drawing the hatred of all my fellow purists, I'm OK with this rule. At least I'm at the "So far, so good" stage of my acceptance after one trial run. Let's look at the results of last night:
NFL.com - The clubs combined for eight kickoffs in the 21-17 Bears win that ended with 3:31 left in the third quarter. The longest of the eight was returned to the 31-yard line. Three were brought back to the 26. One was a touchback that came out to the 30.
The average starting position was the 25.6-yard line.
It's just one game, but there was a noticeable lack of explosive plays. It even caught Bears Hall of Fame returner Devin Hester off guard.
"I'm watching it, man, and I'm surprised that we're not seeing more big runs," he said during an in-game interview, via Awful Announcing. "You know, that's shocking. But hey, it's the first game. So I figure a lot of coaches are going to evaluate this game and try to figure out what they can do to get some more big plays. But right now -- it's kinda shaky right now. But who knows? The first game. We'll see."
"We'll see" is right. There's a lot to be considered and the cleverer special teams coaches will figure out the ways to exploit the weaker ones. But if nothing else, if no other factor is considered, at least these were actual plays. The football being caught and run with. Blocks being thrown and shed. Ballcarriers being pursued and tackled. Which is something we've seen far too seldom since the last time the league tinkered with the kickoff. Mike Golic said it well:
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A long time ago I reached my limit of watching a touchdown, followed by a replay review, followed by the extra point, followed by a commercial break, followed by a kickoff through the back of the end zone, followed by another commercial. The result is a good 10 minutes between competitive plays. When that's the case almost eight out of 10 times, it's too much. It's sand being thrown on the ice. At least with this "dynamic kickoff," there's something going on for one play in between watching the Chiefs grabassing with Jake from State Farm.
Even as weird and hard to process as this is, it's better than just waiting to see if Brandon Aubrey (90.8% touchback rate) will kick it through the end zone or over it this time. If I want to watch one guy work while 21 others stand around doing nothing, I can go to any state government office in Massachusetts, thanks.
And for the immediate future, it'll be interesting to see different teams' approaches. For instance, Bill Belichick told Pat McAfee when he was doing draft coverage with him, “There will be more of an emphasis on size players in the return game than speed. You just need guys who can play at the point of attack, shed blocks and defend their space because of the new alignment. So I think it will increase the size of the players that are on the field. And I do think that because everybody is spread across the field, if these returners, if they hit a little bit of space, they’re gone.”
One can only hope. And I reserve the right to change my mind if this turns into a total clown show as the season goes on. But for now, I'd rather have a bizarre, chaotic play I can't understand than no play at all.