The NFL’s New Kickoff Rules Still Need to Be Tweaked

The NFL’s new kick return rules still need some tweaks to make them work effectively. Through three preseason games and two regular season games, the best thing you can say about the changes is that they are different. Right now, it seems like more than anything, the rules changes have deprived the Green Bay Packers of a weapon that they have in return specialist Keisean Nixon.

I do give the NFL credit for trying to improve kick returns. Player safety was an issue with plenty of high-speed collisions taking place on kick returns. That’s because players raced down the field at full speed and had impactful collisions as the coverage team tried to break through the blocking wedge and reach the ball carrier.

So, the league cut down the distance and time players had to run and didn’t let them start moving until the ball was caught or landed on the ground. In theory, it reduces the intense high-speed collisions that can cause the most damage to a player’s body.

However, the excitement and game-changing potential of a long kickoff return has been lost thus far this season. After two games, the Packers have returned a grand total of one kick. That return was actually a mistake, a desperate gamble by Nixon late in the loss to the Eagles where Nixon ran the ball back from deep in the end zone to try to make a game-breaking play and set the Packers up with a short field. Instead, he was tackled inside the 30-yard line and took valuable time off the clock.

Officially, Nixon has returned one kick for 24 yards while the opposing team has run back two kickoffs for 38 yards through the first two games of the 2024 season.

One of the stated goals of the new rules was to create more returns albeit with fewer full speed collisions. The hope was that teams would try to place their kicks in the “landing zone” and try to pin opponents inside the 30. Return specialists would still have the opportunity to try to do better than that and bring the ball back beyond the 30-yard line.

Instead, kickoffs have sailed into or even out of the end zone and teams have been content to take over on the 30. Yes, it’s better field position than last year’s rules that placed the ball on the 25, but the difference isn’t significant or game changing. The way the rule is set up right now, it’s simply too easy to kick the ball into the end zone and have the opposing team take over on the 30. So, we’re barely seeing any returns at all.

Teams have yet to figure out a great way to kick off and pin opposing teams deep on a consistent basis without kicking the ball out of bounds. They have also yet to figure out a good way to return kicks for long gains.

The Packers did come close on one of their first kicks against the Eagles. Brayden Narveson kicked off and the ball squibbed inside the 10 and it stayed in bounds. The Eagles Kenneth Gainwell muffed the kick at the four, managed to recover it at the seven and ran it out to the 16.

Was this intentional or did Narveson slip on the terrible turf in Sao Paolo? The risk is great that a squibbed kick lands out of bounds which gives the receiving team the ball at the 40, something no team wants to allow. The Packers have not tried to replicate this method of kicking off since.

The league needs to make the penalty for kicking the ball out of end zone greater if they want to deter teams from doing that most of the time. Maybe taking over at the 35 or even the 40 on touchbacks would force kicking teams to put the ball in play more often. Or maybe the alternative is to just eliminate kickoffs and give teams the ball on the 30 to start every drive. That’s something I don’t want to see given the excitement kick returns can generate.

Hopefully, as the weather gets colder, we’ll hopefully see more kickoffs that are caught in the landing zone and get put in play. Right now, the new rules have helped reduce the number of returns and that’s not a good thing.

The Packers have had a string of great return specialists like Al Carmichael, Travis Williams, Steve Odom, Desmond Howard and now Nixon. We don’t want to see the kick return go the way of the drop kick.

The league still has a chance to figure out how to make these rules work for them or to improve on them in some way. But losing kick returns altogether takes something away from the game. The Packers certainly didn’t pay Nixon all that money not to do what he does best on the field.