You really are missing the point. In the long history of the NFL no rule change I’m aware of has been created which specifically reduced the number of plays as a way to improve safety. You drawing that analogy is nonsense.
This rule is stupid not because it makes things safer or because it’s a change against tradition, it’s stupid because it tries to achieve safety, dubiously, by making people play less football. That is patently unacceptable.
As I said before, playing 3 quarters would mean fewer injuries too. That’s really the only analogy which is similar. Adding the forward pass is not similar in any way, nor is requiring 7 men on the line. None of those rules used the premise of fewer plays as a strategy.
Yeah, I think we did see more returns from 5+ yards deep in the endzone. But, I also saw a lot more kicks boomed completely over the endzone. Using Josh Cribbs as an example again, he said he would count the time from the kick to when he caught it. If it was under 4 seconds, he would return it. That is another factor, the ball will get to the returner slightly earlier…of course the coverage will, too.
When I checked Sunday, there were still 4 quarters of football, with 15 minutes per quarter. Still 4 downs to go 10 yards, still a play clock, still delay of game penalties, and hurry up offenses.
They haven’t made people “play less football”, they simply took one of the more dangerous kinds of plays and made it happen less frequency. This “less football” simply isn’t true. If you want to say there is less of a certain kind of football, have at it. But it’s not “less football”.
This might be the part I’m missing. I guess I don’t get the idea that there’s “less” football.
Maybe it’s because I don’t think of kick returns as being such an integral part of the game that they need to be preserved as they were between 1994 and 2010, inviolate.
Or maybe it’s because my team doesn’t have Devin Hester.
I suspect that kickers, on average, have stronger legs now than they did 30 years ago, thanks to full-year training programs, and improvements in training techniques. I watched NFL football for many years, when kickoffs were from the 35, and while there were certainly some kickoffs which made it into the end zone, I don’t recall that it was the norm for kickoffs to reach the end zone in those days.
OTOH, we have one week of data at this point…I’m sure that someone will do an analysis of it when we get to the end of the season.
I have a feeling that except for a few diehards this controversy will be pretty much forgotten by the end of the year and it will not have the negitive impact to gameplay that people seem to fear. This will go the way of the ‘punts will hit the Dallas Gigant-o-screen all the time!!!111!!! Make them take it down!!!111!!!oneoneone’ fiasco we dealt with in 2009.
Did anyone watch the Denver-Oakland game? There wasn’t a singe kickoff returned, and I’m not aware that there was a single one in which the ball wasn’t out of the back of the endzone. In the Chicago game, at sea level on the Soldier Field turf, Gould kicked at least half of his kicks out the back of the endzone and he’s got a relatively weak leg for an NFL kicker.
I’m pretty sure that prior to 1994 kicks out of the back of the endzone were pretty rare, even in Denver. Saying that this rule is a return to pre-1994 status is simply not the case practically speaking, the game was changed in '94 for a very good reason.
I noticed that. I’ve never seen so many return guys put a knee down in the end zone before.
*Heading into Sunday night’s game between the Dallas Cowboys and New York Jets, 49 percent of kickoffs (63 of 129) were touchbacks. Last season only 18 percent (24 of 137) were not returned the opening weekend.
Read more: New kicking rule produces more touchbacks | Fox News
*
Gregg Easterbrook (as is often the case) made an interesting point. First of all, this was the first time since 1958 there were three kickoff returns of 100 yards of more for touchdowns in the first week. So it’s clearly not an issue with it being the first week of the season; the factors about new personnel have happened every year since then, yet it didn’t happen.
He also pointed out that in previous years, the returner would line up in front of the goal line, then often have to go backwards to get to the football. Now, they line up behind the goal and can be running full tilt as they get the ball.
Further, the rule also says that the kicking team lines up five yards behind the ball instead of ten. They aren’t going as fast when the ball is kicked, ensuring they take a bit longer to go down the field. This, combined with the runner always being at full speed when they reach him, may lead to far more long returns than people think.
I think the point being made up thread is that the players are extra-weak and less effective this year due to the severely truncated pre-season workouts/training camps. That coupled with the fact that you generally have your shittiest guys on special teams results in extra shitty guys this year.
"Dr. Hunt Batjer, the co-chair of NFL Head, Neck & Spine Committee and department chair of neurological surgery at Northwestern University, said Wednesday that concussions on kickoffs were cut in half in the 2011 season. …
“We just got the data recently,” Batjer said. “It looks to me like a decreased number of runbacks played a role. It did not affect a lot of the other injuries paradoxically.”
That means other injuries, like ankle sprains, were not dramatically reduced by the significant drop in kickoff returns. Touchbacks nearly tripled from 2010 to 2011 with 1,120, according to Elias Sports Bureau, and the number of kickoff returns in 2010 (2,033) dropped to 1,375 in 2011."
Just FYI. I’ll also note that it appears touchdowns off of kickoff returns dropped from 23 in 2010 to 9 in 2011. Although 2010 was a up year for KOR td’s. The 3 year average from 2008 to 2011 was 17.6.
Great! Now if we can just reduce the game to 30 minutes long, we could cut even more concussions out. Eventually, if we can just gradually get them to stop playing, we could have a concussion-free NFL.
(If the NFL wanted to make a substantial impact, by the way, on concussion rates without affecting the game, they’d make the players wear the goofy looking helmets that legitimately do reduce concussion rate in all circumstances)
Here is a column from CNNSI, why helmets can’t solve concussions. I realize it is a hockey related story but it most likely holds true for football as well.
