I might guess that it’s to make it even more clear to the receiving team that an onside kick is about to be attempted.
OK, I was incorrect. It looks like the ball will be kicked from the 34 yard line, but the other 10 members of the kicking team will be allowed to line up at the 35. Since a kickoff has to travel at least 10 yards from the spot from which it was kicked, before it can be recovered by the kicking team, this positions the members of the kicking team nine yards away from that “recovery” line, rather than 10 (which has always been the distance in the past), apparently in an effort to make the odds of recovering an onside kick a bit better (it was only successful 6% of the time in 2024).
Thanks, that makes sense. I couldn’t figure out why they wanted to make it even worse given the 6% success rate. Still, any advantage has to be marginal at best. Bring on 4th and 15!
Colts owner Jim Irsay passed away in his sleep today. He was 65.
Not to speak ill of the dead, but I doubt a lot of people in Indy are going to miss Irsay. Guy was the archetypal nepobaby and a jackass to boot.
Irsay’s Wikipedia entry, at this moment, reads:
Possibly more relevantly: Irsay had issues with chemical dependency for a number of years. He had been arrested for DUI in 2014, was found to have several bottles of prescription medications in his car, and tested positive for opiods; the incident led to a six-game suspension by the NFL. In late 2023, he was found unresponsive in his home, and hospitalized, where he was treated with Narcan (a drug which is given to those who have overdosed on opiods).
Irsay had inherited the team from his father, Bob Irsay, who had moved the Colts to Indianapolis from Baltimore “in the middle of the night” in 1984. Jim’s daughter Carlie is a co-owner of the team, and took over day-to-day operations in 2014 when her father was suspended; it’s probably a good guess that she’ll be the primary owner of the team now.
The ESPN article on Irsay’s passing notes that, after his 2023 hospitalization, he had what the team then described as a “severe respiratory illness,” and that his public appearances since then had been limited; he had not attended either of the league meetings in the past few months, nor the draft last month.
65 seems young but for everything he put his body through, it was probably more like the body of an 85-year-old.