Football hoping to make special teams safer or do away with them entirely (and not just because the Packers special teams stink)
Today on The Leap, we are happy to bring you a blurb from a new book The Science Football in which authors Will Carroll and Tyler Brooke take a look at how the game is being pushed forward by science, data, and technology in all aspects of the sport. With help from current and former players, coaches, and analysts, Tyler and Will take a look at how the game of football is evolving, and what the future of the game could look like.
In March of 2018, Green Bay Packers president Mark Murphy, a member of the league’s competition committee, told reporters that the NFL would consider removing kickoffs altogether to make the game safer. He suggested a dramatic course of action could be on the table if data showed that kickoffs weren’t becoming safer despite recent rule changes.
“If you don’t make changes to make it safer, we’re going to do away with it,” Murphy warned. “It’s that serious. It’s by far the most dangerous play in the game.”
Kickoff returns tend to feature the most violent collisions in the sport, simply because of the velocity at which players run at each other. The kickoff team takes off at a full sprint from the 40-yard line towards the ball carrier, typically 45 to 50 yards, while the return man catching the kickoff must run at full speed towards them.
The NFL has implemented changes to increase the number of touchbacks on kickoff returns. When a player catches the ball in the end zone and takes a knee, or the ball bounces into the end zone, the receiving team will automatically get the ball at their own 25-yard line. In 2016, the NFL changed their touchback rules to give the receiving team the ball at the 25-yard line instead of the 20. In 2011, the NFL moved the kickoff from the 35-yard line to the 40. These two rule changes helped lead to a record number of touchbacks in 2020, with kickoffs resulting in a touchback 61.2 percent of the time.
Despite the increased number of touchbacks, injuries still occur on the play. In Week 8 of the 2021 season, Green Bay Packers return man Kylin Hill and Arizona Cardinals running back Jonathan Ward collided on a kickoff taken out of the end zone. Both players were carted off the field, with Hill suffering a season-ending knee injury. It’s uncertain what the NFL will do to reduce the number of injuries on kickoffs, or if they will get rid of the play altogether. However, former Stanford center Sam Schwartzstein believes he has the answer to fixing the league’s kickoff problem.
Oliver Luck hired Schwartzstein to become the XFL’s Director of Football Operations, Innovation and Strategy in July of 2018. Sam was hired to help on multiple decisions from player compensation, designing the league’s football, and most importantly, creating the new rules for the league.
“As we built out the rule change process, we knew that special teams was one of the big things that we wanted to change,” Schwartzstein said. Before creating the new rules, the XFL interviewed more than 6,000 fans toget an idea of what they wanted to see changed in the game of football. The answers they received from those fans helped create what Sam called the four pillars that they used to create their rulebook. Those pillars were:
• Minimizing idle time to speed up the game
• Reducing meaningless plays
• Creating a more dynamic and rhythmic game
• Making the game safer without losing the feeling of traditional football
When the XFL signed a broadcasting deal with ESPN and FOX, McMahon was focused on several things to make the game more appealing. That included the elimination of kickoffs being sandwiched by commercial breaks, speeding up instant replay reviews, and reducing the number of penalties without sacrificing player safety. Some of those big changes required new rules to keep the going flowing. Schwartzstein said that he went line by line through the NFL rulebook and asked “why?” on every single rule.
Most NFL rules are intended for player safety, but other rules such as having specific jersey numbers tied to certain positions and responsibilities felt a bit more arbitrary.
For any potential rule changes, Schwartzstein and the league wanted to make sure that they fit into one of their four pillars. If fans didn’t specifically ask for it one of the pillars, the league leaned towards maintaining tradition in order to avoid making the league feel gimmicky. That was where special teams became a huge focus for Schwartzstein and his team.
“Fans don’t hate special teams,” Schwartzstein said. “They just want it to be exciting.”
The main pillar that their new special teams rules focused on was reducing meaningless plays. Schwartzstein wanted to reduce the number of plays that involved almost no action, specifically kickoffs for touchbacks, kicks and punts going out of bounds, and fair catches. Over 60 percent of punts and kickoffs in the NFL were deemed meaningless plays according to the Schwartzstein’s research.
The XFL wanted to find ways to keep the game traditional and safe while finding ways to give fans more action on special teams. That was especially true for kickoffs, a play that results in a touchback and an untimed play more often that an actual return in the NFL.
According to Schwartzstein, 18 percent of injuries in the NFL occur on kickoffs, despite them only counting for six percent of all plays. Seeing that players were three times more likely to get hurt on kickoffs, he wanted to see what specifically caused the injuries to occur. The problem was that players on the kicking team were traveling more
than 35 yards to make contact with blockers and the ball carrier on kicks that were returned. That kind of momentum created high-collision impacts that led to more injured players.
The XFL’s solution was simple, yet effective. Instead of having the kicking team’s players start where the kickoff happened, the league instead moved every single player besides the kicker and the return man within five yards of each other before the kick. The kicking team would start on the 35-yard line, while the receiving team started on the 30-yard line. Once the ball was kicked, all players besides the return man and kicker would have to wait until the ball was fielded by the return man to begin the play.
Carroll is a long-time football writer with a focus on injuries while Brooke covers the Green Bay Packers for Acme Packing Company. You can purchase The Science of Football here.