In response to an all-time low kickoff return rate in 2023, the NFL introduced a new “Dynamic Kickoff” rule for the 2024 season in an attempt to get that rate back up.
And it worked, with the rate jumping from 21.8% to 32.8% this past season. But even though player safety has been said to be at the forefront of past changes to the kickoff format, the NFL evidently isn’t content with such a “small” rate increase.
Their goal is to double it; they’d ideally like to get that rate up to between 60% and 70% in 2025. The problem is they have just introduced a rule change that takes away pretty much any and all incentive from kick returners to actually return kicks.
The same Dynamic Kickoff rule is set to be in effect this year, but touchbacks are set to come out to the 35-yard line, as opposed to the 30-yard line.
NFL making a big kickoff mistake?
The NFL’s logic is that this will incentivize kickers to avoid kicking the ball into the end zone as often, since under the Dynamic Kickoff rule, kicks that land in the “Landing Zone”, which is between the goal line and the 20-yard line, must be returned.
And here’s why the NFL is moving the ball to the 35-yard line on a touchback: https://t.co/Wluz8cafRD
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) April 1, 2025
And this could very well be true. Perhaps the threat of a team starting from the 35-yard line instead of the 30-yard line will indeed be enough to prevent the kicker from simply conceding a touchback as often as we’ve seen in the past.
But there’s another element to this: if a kick comes up short of the landing zone, it’s treated the same way as a kick that goes out of bounds. The offense then starts on the 40-yard line.
So just how much are kickers going to let up, per se, on kickoffs?
Given the fact that the average return was only 27.8 yards in 2024 when the touchback spot was at the 30-yard line, the NFL is now drastically reducing the possibility that any kicks that don’t land in the landing zone will be returned at all.
Think about it. A touchback generated 2.2 yards over the average kick return in 2024, and only two players who averaged more than one return per week had an average return of over 30 yards. In 2025 with the new touchback spot, a touchback would be generating 7.2 extra yards.
And neither one of those two players eclipsed 35.
Why not just take a knee?
The only way this works out is if kickers are consistently hitting the landing zone. And even then, the player safety issue would really ramp back up. Yes, the injury rate on kickoffs has come down, but we were still talking about fewer than one-third of kicks being returned in 2024. If you double that rate, you’ll undoubtedly be dealing with more injuries.
The NFL is walking a tightrope here, and one could argue that they are trying to fix something that is no longer broken, since they quite literally did fix the major problem in 2024.
But even looking far beyond last year’s rule change, never before have the calls been louder for the old kickoff rule, which was changed in 2011, to return.