I’ve been trying to give it a chance, but watching Monday Night Football tonight kind of sealed it for me: I hate the new kickoff rules! The regular kickoff is dumb, the onside kick is dumb, the free kick after a safety is dumb. The whole thing is dumb and I want it to go away. I’m sure it won’t go away this season, but I really wish it would. I don’t think it’s enough to make me stop watching, but I think it’s exceptionally stupid.
I didn’t even care about the results of tonight’s games; I was just watching to have them on and the only thing that really is sticking with me is how dumb the kickoffs are now.
They need to say that if you score, you get the ball, but it’s fourth and 25 from your own 25. Get it to midfield, you keep it, but 99% of the time you’re better off punting. Special teams in general are these weird relics that have (d)evolved into minigames that exist mostly to tweak play-balance for the “real” football.
Shoot, you could get rid of kicking altogether if you really wanted to. Have an incomplete pass on fourth down be treated like a punt, and replace the goalposts with some sort of skills-competition target that QBs can hit at roughly the same percentage that kickers make field goals.
I think 4th and 15 from the 30/35 actually has similar expected success rates and field position to the original onside kick rules. But I definitely agree with the concept