The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Safer but less successful onside kicks
Strategy may be abandoned for rule changes on kickoffs.
Onside kicks have long been one of the most exciting plays in the NFL, from the Saints’ surprise onside kick and recovery that helped fuel their Super Bowl victory over the Colts nine years ago, to countless lategame attempts by teams hoping for one final possession to mount a comeback.
But the play has more or less been taken out of the game this season, as one side effect of the league’s new kickoff rules, put in place this season in an attempt to make the play safer. Simply put, it has become next to impossible for the kicking team to recover an onside kick.
So the question becomes: How much does that matter?
The early indications have been that the new rules, enacted after the NFL’s competition committee sought and received offseason input from special teams coaches from around the league, are accomplishing the primary goal of the revamping of the play, which is to reduce the number of concussions suffered by players on kickoffs.
When NFL officials and competition committee members evaluate the success of the new kickoff rules in Year 1, then, they will have to weigh the injury data with competitive considerations. If the new rules indeed have managed to curb concussions on kickoffs and make the play safer, will it matter that the onside kick is more or less being taken out of the game? Will that lead to further tweaking of the rules? Or if onside kicks can’t be fixed with further tweaking, is that enough to declare the new rules a failure and move on to contemplating prospective alternatives to the kickoff ?
For now, it’s not clear. League leaders declined to say publicly what they think about the decline in onsidekick success this season or to specify what, if anything, they plan to do in reaction. The NFL, after announcing in October that there had been zero concussions suffered by players on kickoffs during the preseason, is awaiting the final injury data for the 2018 regular season. The work of the competition committee intensifies next month as it begins to consider potential rule-change proposals for next season.
But the numbers are striking. According to figures provided to the league by Elias, kicking teams recovered only four of 53 onside kicks this season, or 7.5 percent. That’s after they recovered 13 of 60 onside kicks last season, or 21.7 percent, under the previous kickoff rules.
One person familiar with the league’s inner workings said there is a distinction to be made between expected onside kicks, those that come at the end of games with the kicking team trailing, and surprise onside kicks, like Payton’s Super Bowl masterpiece. The success rate of expected onside kicks has always been low and hasn’t changed all that much under the new kickoff rules, the person said.
“So this is really a conversation about the success rate of surprise onside kicks,” the person said, adding that rate was historically low this season but pointing out that such plays occur infrequently during a season.
No matter how it’s broken down, nobody was recovering many onside kicks, whether expected or surprise, this season. And competition committee members previously have acknowledged the importance of onside kicks to the sport.
“It’s exciting,” Green Bay Packers President Mark Murphy, a member of the committee, said during the meetings in May in New York at which the new rules were discussed with special teams coaches. “One of the best things about our game is that you can catch up with the onside kick. To completely lose some of those things would be a big change to the game. But when you’re staring at injury data, you’ve got to do something.”
The reasons for the lack of success experienced by teams with onside kicks this season seem clear. Under the new rules, players on the kicking team no longer can get a running start before the ball is kicked. The kicking team also is prohibited from overloading one side of the field by putting most of its players on that side of the formation. Those provisions contribute to making kickoffs safer. But they also reduce the level of the chaos that once existed for the players on the receiving team tasked with gathering in the loose football on an onside kick amid collisions and with so many bodies flying around.
Some teams might be simply giving up on onside kicks. The Dallas Cowboys opted against an onside kick, and instead kicked the ball off deep, last Saturday night in Los Angeles when trailing the Rams, 30-22, with just over two minutes to play. The Cowboys, with three timeouts remaining and the two-minute warning ahead, trusted their defense to force a Rams’ punt. As it turned out, the Rams got two first downs, ran out the clock and advanced to Sunday’s NFC title game at New Orleans.