Bad punts and bad field goals I can understand. They are subject to the quality of the snap and hold, and are kicked under extreme pressure and at varying distances.
But all kick-offs are unopposed and kicked off a tee. They should be perfect just about every time, right? Yet it is not uncommon to have a short/bad kick. What gives?
Ever play golf? Same principle. It might look easy on TV, but to actually kick a ball straight for 60-70 yards is pretty difficult even in perfect conditions.
The actual margin of error for kicking an odd shaped ball with the even odder shape of the human foot is really, really small.
Ever wonder why the NBA shoots free throws at less than 100%? Totally uniform situation, no weather, round ball, uniform target, no tactical considerations, and still they muff it. A lot.
Well, kick-offs used to be pretty uneventful. In, say, the early 90s, almost every team had somebody on the team that could kick the ball into the end zone 19 times out of 20, so hardly any returns happened.
The league then decided that this was Boring. So they shortened the tee that the ball sits on, and moved the kicker back 5 or 10 yards. All of a sudden, most teams couldn’t just rely on their kicker to kick the ball out of the end zone, and kickers who couldn’t get it there had to learn how to do a directional kick, where they put it long and far and near one of the sidelines. (The kicker for my team at the time, Chris Jackie, went from being an automatic touchback to hardly ever getting it inside the 15.)
Did I mention that this was also around the time that the league made it a huge penalty to kick the ball out of bounds? So now the kicker has even less area to aim for, to ensure that it doesn’t go out of bounds.
Add to that what happened a couple years ago, when the league stated that all kickoffs shall be done with a nearly new ball, which have a tendancy to be rock-hard in cold weather, rather than letting the kickers “warm up” or “break in” a group of balls before each game, and you get the end result of the poor kickoffs that you notice today.
So, the answer to your question is “because the league keeps adding difficulty to the kickoff so that the majority of kickers will never be ‘really good’ at it, thereby ensuring big, exciting kickoff returns.”
It seems to me that a truly muffed kick (not an onsides kick or squib kick) is pretty rare. All but three active kickers in the NFL averaged greater than fifty yards per kick this last season, with most averaging over sixty. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
And those three only had four kicks between them–the lowest “average” was Jason Elam’s, but it was his only kickoff in either 2003 or 2004, and it was an onside kick late in the 17-45 Bronco loss to Kansas City on 12/19/2004. Before, when he was kicking off regularly, his average was always greater than 60.
Doesn’t seem to be the case. Notice the bottom entry in the chart–Jason Elam’s. He has one onside kick, and it’s the one that is entered in the total kick off column.
I stand corrected. That will be a 5-yard penalty on me for a short kickoff out of bounds. The next infraction will giveRM Mentock the ball at the spot where it went out of bounds.