The greatest trick Bill Belichick pulled so far this season wasn’t leading a team helmed by Jimmy Garoppolo and an anonymous quarterback from N.C. State that nobody, not even most people on Tobacco Road, had heard of, to a basically insurmountable 3-0 record in the AFC East. It hasn’t been making his no-name defense turn mediocre offenses into terrible ones. It hasn’t even been his ability to turn both his shorts and sweatshirts into something Daisy Duke would probably say was too risque. No, the Hall of Fame coach’s greatest move has been exploiting a massive, new flaw in the NFL rulebook and using it to his team’s distinct, legal advantage in the rule’s infancy.
Over the offseason, the NFL, in its eternal wisdom and frivolous desire to make the game safer, decided to bring out kickoff touchbacks to the 25-yard line, figuring that kickoff returners would be more inclined to down the ball in the end zone now that they were getting five free yards for doing so. On the surface, it seemed like a reasonable idea, I guess. But the NFL didn’t see two things coming. First, kick returners, by and large, are glory boys. No matter how deep a ball sails into the end zone, returners will always want to bring it out because a 103-yard kickoff return for a touchdown is a lot more sexy than taking a knee. Devin Hester didn’t get famous by playing it safe.
Second, and this is what had Belichick licking his lips, given the speed of the kick, return team and cover team, the initial collisions on a kickoff happen at about the 15-yard line, meaning a returner has to go about 10 more yards to get to the 25. It might not sound like it, but getting from the 20 to the 25 is harder than it seems. So why not pooch a kickoff to land inside the five, take the touchback off the table and force returners to run every single time, assuming (rightly) that they’ll be tackled before the 25. That’s exactly what Belichick has done and it’s worked every single time.
The Patriots have kicked off 18 times this season, and haven’t had a team start a drive from beyond the 25-yard line once. Stephen Gostkowski has 10 touchbacks. The other eight led to returns inside the 25 and, on Thursday night, two fumbles. Check and mate.
“Our kickoff guys are doing a great job. It would be dumb just to kick it out of the end zone every time right now,” Gostkowski told USA TODAY Sports on Thursday night.
It’s not just the Patriots that have figured this out. Twenty-four of the 32 NFL teams have kicked a smaller percentage of touchbacks through two weeks of the NFL season than in 2015. (It’s a small sample size, yes.) The Ravens, for instance, had 85% of kickoffs downed for touchbacks last year. The rate is at 66% in 2016.
Thirteen teams have a lower touchback-percentage than the Pats but Belichick is doing it with more panache. It’s purely intentional. Those two fumbles on kickoffs on Thursday night, both led to scores and, despite the popular narrative of the morning, did more to win that game that anything a (very solid) Jacoby Brissett did.
The obvious problem is that a rule intended to minimize kickoff returns is actually increasing them. And given that we’re only two games into the season for most teams, expect this trend to spread league-wide soon. Sure, the Patriots are in position to take advantage of this because their kicker, Stephen Gostkowski, is adept at being able to place the ball on a 65-yard kickoff, but you can bet that the other 31 kickers around the league will spend almost all their practice time trying to land kickoffs on the three-yard line, Pats-style.
So what happens next? There had been speculation that the league would re-evaluate the efficacy of the rule after four weeks but Roger Goodell said Thursday that the league wouldn’t change anything in the middle of the season. It’s a typically myopic view by the league’s front office who, when presented with overwhelming evidence that something isn’t working and is theoretically putting more players in danger, ignores it and declares that their hands are tied until the end of the year. Nonsense. It’s your league. You can change the rules. This isn’t baseball. The rules aren’t so sacrosanct that you can’t fiddle with them midseason. There have been approximately 30 definitions of a catch put in the rulebook over the past decade. Don’t tell me you can’t go back to a rule that’s existed since the beginning of (NFL) time after four games and admit this was a disaster.
That the NFL’s rules committee couldn’t see this coming is baffling. If you thought about this for more than a few hours and talked out every possible scenario, there was no doubt this would be the rational play. It wouldn’t work every time (even Gostkowski is just 8-18 on the pooches) but it’d work enough.
It’s time for the NFL to act, not because Bill Belichick is smarter than everybody else and getting an advantage, but because kickoffs are the most dangerous plays and the NFL, in a desperate attempt to make the league safer, has unknowingly made it more dangerous.
Waiting a year is unconscionable. Act now. The livelihoods and health of special teams players depend on it.