On a February afternoon in Las Vegas, Harrison Butker of the Kansas City Chiefs took seven steps toward the football, as many in the crowd of 62,000 at Allegiant Stadium held their phones aloft to capture the most anticipated moment of the NFL season: Super Bowl Sunday kickoff, finally, the beginning of the big game. More than 100 million viewers also tuned in, rapt with anticipation.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Butker proceeded to bum them all out. The ball sailed over the head of the San Francisco 49ers kick returner, out of the end zone for a touchback. Bor-ing.
Whereas Devin Hester of the Chicago Bears started off Super Bowl XLI, in 2007, with a bang by returning the opening kickoff for a touchdown—and nine other speedsters, including Fulton Walker, Desmond Howard, and Percy Harvin have done the same over the years—not a single Super Bowl LVIII kickoff produced even a play. There were 13 kickoffs in the game. And 13 dull touchbacks.
The NFL is seeking to sack such tedium. Back in March, the league passed new kickoff rules for this upcoming season, which begins on September 5. They’re somewhat convoluted, but here’s our stab at an explainer.
Teams will still kick off from their own 35-yard line, but receiving teams will start from their own 30, instead of their own 25, on a touchback, offering less incentive for the kicking team to just blast the ball out of the end zone. Meanwhile, the 10 other players on the kicking team will be positioned at the other team’s 40-yard line, rather than the point of the kickoff, as in the past. At least nine players on the receiving team must line up in the “setup zone” between their own 35- and 30-yard lines; in the past, eight or nine receiving-team players would set up between the kicking team’s 45-yard line and the receiving team’s 40.
None of these players can move until the kicked ball has hit the ground or the hands of a returner in the “landing zone,” between the receiving team’s 20-yard line and the goal line. (If a kick fails to reach the 20, the receiving team takes possession at its own 40-yard line: that’s attractive field position.) This alignment approximates a play from scrimmage, with the kicking and receiving team facing each other in close space, which should keep kickoffs safer. Traditionally, players build up speed when running downfield, creating high-impact collisions. Under the new rules, balls that fall in the landing zone must be returned.
“The two major themes that everybody is trying to work through is to make the kickoff relevant again, bring that exciting play back more into the game, but it has to be something that is designed in a manner that hopefully reduces the injury rate, which has historically been the highest on the kickoff play,” says former referee Walt Anderson, who now works for the NFL as its officiating rules analyst. “That’s really the challenge.”
The early returns look promising. More than 70% of kickoffs were returned in the 2024 preseason, compared to 54.8% during last year’s preseason. The NFL saw 18 returns of at least 40 yards this preseason, double the number from 2023.
But the regular season may tell another story. Just 22% of all NFL kickoffs were returned in the 2023 season, the lowest in history: teams are likely putting kickoffs in play during exhibition games to evaluate their coverage personnel. One qualified skeptic of the new rules—former New England Patriots coach and six-time Super Bowl winner Bill Belichick—predicts that once the games count, teams will continue to boot the ball out of the end zone, like Butker did in the Super Bowl.
Putting the receiving team just five yards closer to the end zone isn’t worth the risk of allowing a premier returner to do more damage. “Once you get into the regular season, if the [opposing] team’s got good returners, it’s just gonna be touchbacks,” Belichick told The Pat McAfee Show in August. “That’s all it’s gonna be. You put them on the 30 instead of 25, I mean, big deal. But I’d rather do that than kick it to one of these guys that can change field position on you in a hurry.”
If you want to create more returns, says Belichick, move the kickoff spot back to the 20 or 25, making it more difficult for the Butkers of the world to put the ball out of play. This tweak makes logical sense.
And here’s the good news: this new format is in play for a year. If it flops, the league can fix it.
“We’ll see what happens during the course of the year,” says Anderson. “Do we want to end up making some changes? Do we want to go back to the drawing board? Everything’s on the table.”
