The new kickoff concept has sparked ingenuity among coaches throughout the NFL. The Chiefs are seriously contemplating the latter, according to special team coordinator Dave Toub, who explained his reasoning by first pointing out what he doesn’t want his regular kicker, Harrison Butker, to do on the kickoff.
“I like to have someone who can go back and make a tackle,” Toub said on Thursday. Butker can make a tackle, but I don’t want him doing it all year. We watched every play in the XFL, and I’m guessing kickers were engaged in at least 25 to 40 percent of the tackles. Either attempting to make a player bounce back, making the tackle himself, or just missing the tackle. We do not want Butker in that scenario. But he’ll be a kicker.
“He’ll be a man we deploy in certain scenarios. He can move the ball, but the other men may not. He can still do a touchback if we need it. You’re just handing away the ball. If we kick a touchback out of the back of the end zone, they will now receive the ball at the 30 rather than the 25. So, 5 yards makes a significant impact. That’s an additional three percent probability for the offense to score. According to Toub, Reid can make tackles.
“He’s an extra guy they’re probably not accounting for,” Toub said. “They know that man is capable of tackling. But a man like Justin is someone they have to be concerned about; they have to block him and stop blocking someone else.”
On the surface, this sounds like reasonable reasoning. Reid has demonstrated he can kick well enough to be considered for the job, is the greatest kicking tackler available, and could be an important member of a stifling kick coverage team in this new environment.
Prime Video analytics expert Sam Schwartzstein, who was instrumental in getting the XFL to adopt a similar kickoff format in 2020, pointed out that Toub might be squandering his time because the kicker can’t cross the 50-yard line anymore according to the new NFL rules, which state that the receiving team must catch the ball.
Schwartzstein stated on social media, “I don’t expect kickers to be as involved in tackles in the NFL because of this rule.” “The kicker was also very involved because they have the best pursuit angle to the ball, as they are lined up further away and in the middle of the field.”There are no predetermined ‘levels’ of coverage; thus, the kicker is always at least the third level.”
If anybody understands how the kickoff may play out in the NFL, it’s Schwartzstein, but that won’t stop coaches throughout the league from digging deeper to prepare for a new special teams frontier.
Toub even recognized that the adjustments are resulting in a completely new set of crucial characteristics, which will need some finesse to strike the balance between being excessively aggressive and too safe.
“Hang time doesn’t matter anymore. “Hang time is over,” Toub added. โฆ “Now the focus is on accuracy. Seeing what you have, how the returners are set up, and attempting to kick away from them in the corners. But you can’t take too much risk because if you hit it out of bounds now, you’ll lose the ball at the 40. If you hit it short of the target zone, you’re handing the ball to the 40. So there’s a narrow line between pushing the boundaries and edges and just falling and saying we can cover.”
