Roger Goodell Comments on Potentially Eliminating Kickoffs

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell spoke with Mark Maske of the Washington Post about the possibility that the league will remove kickoffs entirely from the NFL for safety purposes:

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We've made some very effective changes on the kickoff that have had a very significant impact reducing injuries. It is still a play where we see a higher propensity for head injury. So we want to try to address that. We think there's still further changes that we can make. We won't take anything off the table, including the elimination. But we still think there are some changes that we can make that we'll continue to see progress in that area.

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The NFL's latest rule change to make the play safer appears to have backfired. This season, the league put into place a new rule that would give teams the ball at the 25-yard line for touchbacks rather than the 20, with the hope that more returners would take a knee when the ball was kicked into the end zone rather than attempt to run the ball out.

But many coaches have instructed their kickers to kick the ball high and shy of the end zone with the hope of stopping the returner short of the 25-yard line.

Maske noted: "According to the league's data, 42.2 percent of kickoffs resulted in touchbacks during this year's preseason. That was down from 43.4 percent during the 2015 preseason before the new rule went into effect. The figure was 37.5 percent in 2014 and 45 percent in 2013."

Dean Blandino, the NFL's vice president of officiating, noted the league would begin evaluating the new rule after four weeks of the regular season. The rule is in a trial period for the 2016 campaign.

If the preseason trends continue into the regular season, the new rule may be far less effective than when the league bumped the kickoff five yards closer to the opponent's end zone, making it easier for kickers to reach the end zone.

That rule dramatically changed the kickoff. As Judy Battista of NFL.com wrote in March: "In 2010, before the rule was changed, teams returned 80.1 percent of all kickoffs. The number dropped to 53.5 percent in the 2011 season and has steadily declined ever since. Last season, 41.1 percent of kickoffs were returned."

Tweaking kickoffs is part of a larger movement to make the game safer, as Goodell told Maske:

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We've had 42 safety-related rule changes since 2002. A lot of people questioned — our critics questioned — whether we could make the game safer and better at the same time. I think we've proven that we can, and that making the game safer can and usually does lead to making the game better. … There are other areas that we still think we can make changes on, and the committee has been considering that over the last several years and will continue to do that.

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An NFL without kickoffs appears to be a strong possibility in the near future.

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