The Math on How New NFL Kickoff Rule Will Affect Games
By Jason Lisk
One of the NFL rule changes for 2016 is to move touchbacks on kickoffs to the 25-yard line, on a temporary basis for now, just like how they moved the point after attempt back last year.
The move is transparently designed to further increase touchbacks, which we have already seen take a big leap with the move up to the 35-yard line for the kickoff spot. (Last year, there were just more than half the number of kick returns as in 2010, and it was the lowest number of returns in a non-strike season since the merger).
Using the Game Play Finder at Pro-Football-Reference.com, I went through all kickoffs from week 1 to week 6 last year, to try to assess the further impact of the touchback change.
Here is a summary of all kicks that were returned while being indicated as being kicked to the goal line or into the end zone.
A return to the 20-yard line was roughly the break even point for balls kicked to the end zone. Thus, a returner–depending on his particular skill–had about a 50/50 shot of improving his team’s lot by risking a return.
Simply moving it five yards, though, changes that dynamic quite a bit.
It goes from about a 50/50 proposition, to a 20-25% chance of having a better outcome than simply taking the touchback. The vast majority of those returns were also barely beyond the 26 yard line. And that’s without accounting for the risk of things like costly penalties that pin a team deep, or a fumble. For balls more than 5 yards deep into the end zone, the chance that it is a good decision to return fall to 10%.
Barry Petchesky at Deadspin thinks the new rule could have the opposite effect: rather than fewer returns, the kicking team will be incentivized to sacrifice distance for hang time and force one.
While I think that’s a reasonable strategy response, I’m dubious of that being the outcome. First, as a practical matter, without going too far down the path of projectile physics, you still need your kicker to get a lot of distance to justify the strategy. He probably needs to kick it 55 yards in the air to make the strategy work, with more hang time. That’s a very slight adjustment with lots of room for error for the kicker.
More importantly, I don’t trust that the coaches would make such an adjustment. We haven’t seen that become the norm in college, where the change was implemented. Also, when given an opportunity in an even more incentivized situation–when a penalty moves the kickoff up–we don’t see any strategy adjustment.
Of the 19 kickoffs last year where the kicking team moved up, 14 of them still resulted in touchbacks, 2 more had the kick go into the end zone but were returned, and on only 3 of them did the kick go short.
My guess is this will have a fairly large impact. There might be a few guys who are green-lighted to return regardless, but most teams will take the touchback if the ball is more than a couple yards into the end zone. Before, it was a coin flip, and now it’s just not worth the risk.