At the NFL Owners’ Meeting last week, a significant rule change was passed for kickoffs for the 2024 season. It will be a 1-year trial for this new rule, which can change again in 2025 based on how things go this year.
This is happening because the kickoff was a dying play in 2023. Teams averaged just 24.9 kick return yards per game, the lowest season in NFL history by more than 16 yards. Back in 2008 when specialists like Devin Hester, Josh Cribbs and Leon Washington were dominating the league, teams averaged 94.2 yards per game on kick returns.
Something had to be done for a play that was once exciting, but rule changes in the name of player safety have neutered it to the point where 73.0% of kickoffs were touchbacks in 2023, another NFL record.
These new rules will hopefully find the balance in making the play relevant and still making it safe. Let’s look at what the new rules are as they are wordy, and let’s look at what impact it could have on scoring –and therefore on your NFL betting– this season.
The New NFL Kickoff Rule
The new NFL kickoff rule has been inspired by what the XFL used in 2023. For those not familiar, here is what to expect this year:
- The kicker will still kick off from their 35-yard line as has been the case since 2011.
- But the other 10 players on the kicking team must line up at the opponent’s 40.
- The receiving team can have 2 players deep to receive the kickoff.
- The other 9 players on the receiving team must line up in the set-up zone in the 30 to 35-yard line.
- This should prevent a lot of nasty collisions since players won’t have that usual running start.
- In fact, only the kicker and returners are allowed to move until the ball hits the ground, hits a receiving player, or goes through the end zone.
- The kick has to sail into the “landing zone” in between the opponent 20 and the end zone. If it lands short of the landing zone, it will be treated like a kickoff that went out of bounds, giving the opponent the ball at their own 40.
- If the ball lands in the end zone for a touchback, the team gets to start at the 30-yard line instead of the last touchback rule of the 25-yard line.
- But if the ball lands in the landing zone and trickles into the end zone, the receiving team has to return or down it. If they down it, they only get the ball at their 20-yard line.
- The surprise onside kick is no longer possible in this format.
- Onside kicks can only be attempted in the 4th quarter and will be with the pre-2024 kickoff rules, which have made it close to impossible to recover one.
Kicking off a new era: Owners just approved the NFL Hybrid Kickoff rule, per source.
After years of tweaks turned one of the game’s most exciting moments into a “dead, ceremonial play”, the league hopes this overhaul will yield what it wants: fewer injuries and more returns. pic.twitter.com/jHLAjZJm0z— Tom Pelissero (@TomPelissero) March 26, 2024
It sounds like an absolute nightmare for the Madden coders who are going to have to actually put in some effort to emulate this in the new copy of their game. But for the rest of us, it’s not that hard to follow.
Basically, kickers are still going to be booting it from the spot they have been producing so many touchbacks from in recent years. That means it should be very rare to see a kicker come up short of the landing zone, resulting in the ball going to the 40-yard line and really helping the receiving team.
The ideal kick now might be a knuckler to get the ball just shy of the goal line and have it go in the end zone where the returner could either try a bold return or take the touchback to put the ball at the 20. That type of kick could hurt the return teams and help the kickoff teams. Would it be advisable to return the ball from inside your own 5 now? We’ll see.
But we also should expect a fair number of touchbacks where the ball goes in the end zone immediately, and that is going to put the ball at the 30 instead of the 25 now. Advantage to the receiving team.
It should be one of the most interesting things to follow this NFL season as teams tinker with the optimal strategy now that opponents could start a drive at the 40, 30, or 20 depending on where your kickoff lands.
Here’s what the new NFL kickoff will look like this season: pic.twitter.com/vtR5bqGZLK
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) March 26, 2024
What Impact Will Kickoff Rule Have on Scoring?
Many fans may not realize this, but scoring has been down in the NFL. Teams averaged 21.8 points per game in 2023, which was down a hair from 21.9 points per game in 2022.
Normally, you would blame something like quarterback injuries for a down year in scoring, and 2023 certainly had its issues with a quarter of the league’s primary quarterbacks going down with a season-ending injury. Likewise, a season like 2017 had a lot of big-name quarterback injuries and scoring dipped to 21.7 points per game, the only other season under 22.0 since 2010 before the last two years.
But there is something different about this consistent downward trend from the last 2 seasons. In fact, it is the first time since 2006-07 when the league average was under 22.0 points in back-to-back seasons.
It is hard to predict what impact this new kickoff rule will have on scoring, since we don’t have a great idea of what the breakdown will be for drives that start at the 40, the 30, the 20, or something else from a return with all these new possibilities.
𝗥𝗘𝗣𝗢𝗥𝗧: The #NFL is growing concerned with the dip in scoring over the last few seasons, says Competition Committee chairman Rich McKay.
The average points per game by both teams in 2020 was 49 points, but this year it was all the way down to 43.5. pic.twitter.com/0O2WK4GCJm— JPAFootball (@jasrifootball) March 24, 2024
According to Pro Football Reference, the expected points on a drive starting with 1st-and-10 at your own 25 (the old touchback rule) is 0.610. If you start at your own 20, that more than cuts in half down to 0.280. But if you start at your own 30, that number goes up to 0.940. So, those 5-yard differences can represent a third of a point either way, and teams average about 185 drives in a season. But we won’t be able to make a solid prediction until we know what the new touchback rate will be. It won’t be 73% again, but it could still be 55%. We won’t know until we start getting NFL data for this experiment.
The only thing we know for sure is that there will be a lot more kickoff returns in 2024.
Taking a Look at The XFL
With the XFL using a similar system in 2023, they had a 97% kickoff return rate compared to 22% for the NFL. The XFL had 8.5 kickoffs returned per game compared to just 2.2 per game in the NFL in 2023.
In 40 games, the XFL saw 1 kickoff return touchdown and 4 players with a return greater than 50 yards. But their average return was only 21.3 yards, which was down from the NFL’s average rate of 23.0 yards. So, it may still be difficult to break long ones now that teams don’t have a running start on kickoffs. It should be safer too with fewer high-impact collisions.
What to Expect
But something had to be done to bring relevancy back to the kickoff. This experiment is a step in the right direction, and it could add value to special teams’ players again. We’ve already seen the Steelers sign a player like Cordarrelle Patterson after this rule change went into effect. Patterson is one of the greatest kick returners in NFL history with an average return of 29.3 yards and 9 touchdowns. But he’s had just 34 returns total in the last 3 seasons combined after he had a league-high 35 returns in the 2020 season.
“Why did the Steelers sign Cordarrelle Patterson?”
The Why: pic.twitter.com/2JhfISsew7— SteelYinzer (@YinzerofSteel07) March 29, 2024
Expect a lot more returns this year. But any impact on overall league scoring could come more from the other rule changes this year, including the banning of the hip-drop tackle, an extra challenge if either challenge is successful, and the ability to challenge any down where there was clear and obvious evidence the play clock expired before the snap.
But the radical changes to the kickoff rule are the biggest changes for 2024, and this means you can no longer assume a boring touchback on those plays anymore.
