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The Onside Kick Is Dead. Here’s How To Fix It.
Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday during the NFL season. Email Drew here. Buy his book here.
deadspin.com
The onside kick is dead. Here is how to fix it.
Football games don’t have to end like this. Last year in the NFL, only four onside kicks were recovered all season long, down from 12 in 2017 (with Miami having recovered four of them on their own!). So far this year, no team has recovered one. Two weeks ago, the Colts were down to the Raiders with just 70 seconds left to play. They had all three timeouts left. With that in mind, Frank Reich elected to kick away and hope his defense could stop the Raiders on successive plays. And really, it was the only choice he had. Reich isn’t a dinosaur. He didn’t eschew the onside kick because he was being too conservative. He was simply following the math to its logical end. Thanks to formation restrictions and other safety implementations, the NFL has made it impossible to recover an onside kick, so why bother to attempt one?
Every year, some game ends in a tie, or some other overtime game ends abruptly because one team failed to get a possession in the extra period. And whenever it happens, NFL pundits go apeshit, demanding that the NFL fix overtime in a way that’s fair but not too communistic, fun but not too gimmicky, and results in a definite winner and loser. Meanwhile, close endings in every OTHER game have been hamstrung by the onside kick being murdered. What’s more, the idea of pulling off a SURPRISE onside kick—as the Saints did to deliriously great effect in their Super Bowl upset of the Manning-era Colts—has essentially been stricken from the playbook. This sucks because it’s fun to watch an NFL team risk its ass attempting one at a random moment, particularly when it’s some big road dog attempting to steal away a possession because they already know that they’re overmatched.
This is a crisis. You know about all the visible hindrances to exciting gameplay. We’ve got PI challenges that are rendered futile before the official has even finished jogging back from his little peep show booth. We’ve got the yellow FLAG graphic right there to tell everyone, “Sit back down. This wasn’t anything.” We’ve got 600 quarterbacks hurt: their mangled limbs hanging off the side of the injury cart, with rats skittering over to take a nibble.
But here is an invisible deletion that has robbed every game of a potentially rambunctious ending, and stripped underdogs of a vital tool in their little emergency comeback kits.
In a way, getting rid of the onside kick is FAIR. If you’re down 10 points with two minutes to go, tough shit. You got yourself into this mess. You’re gonna lose fair and square. But I’m not here for what’s fair. FUCK fair. I’m here to be entertained. And I am not entertained by a two-score game being rendered a formality in the twilight of the fourth quarter. I am here for ACTION. I want the onside kick back the way it was. The way the rules used to be, the onside kick was still risky, but they at least left open the tiniest of loopholes to allow for a miracle every now and then. I like miracles in my sports. That’s why I fucking watch them.
The NFL has paid cursory attention to this crisis, even going so far as to consider replacing the onside kick with a fourth-and-15 play from your own 35-yard line. But that idea never got out of development hell, and thus we are stuck, as we are every season, watching games that are a constant work in progress as the NFL lumbers toward a utopian rulebook somewhere in the distance that will make everything fair and perfect.
I don’t need dramatic fixes here. This is not gonna be a listicle of off-the-wall proposals to replace the onside kick with something that’s safer but also more dazzling. I want what I had. I want nervous hands teams. I want kickers going into the laboratory and experimenting with the Rabona, conspiring with special teams coaches to get the maximum amount of both bounce and chaos from drubbing a ball off the turf. I want that split second of doubt where someone falls on the ball but you can’t tell who did until the refs have untangled players from the hogpile.
And the way you do this is simple. You move the receiving team back.
That’s it. The rule now is that the receiving team must be 10 yards off the ball prior to kickoff. The rules also state that the kickoff has to travel 10 yards and hit the ground before it’s a live ball that can be recovered by the kicking team. Without cluster formations, unbalanced formations, and other dangerous wrinkled permitted, that setup reduces current onside kick attempts to a simple handoff, with the kicker forced to boot a 10-yarder directly into enemy hands.
So move the receiving team back another five yards. They gotta start 15 yards away, which gives the kicker a chance to dribble the pigskin into the tiniest of openings before the hands team can get there. The team in front would still be at a massive advantage to recover the ball, seeing as how the kicking team would still have to run twice as far to get to that spot. But at least there’d be SOME chance to recover. That’s all I ask. I don’t need it to be 50/50. I just need there to be enough of a chance that it’s WORTH trying every so often.
Would this make onside kickoffs more dangerous? I guess. But look, they already neutered kickoffs to the point where no one even bothers taking them out of the end zone anymore. And I already know what this game, in total, does to players and I still watch. It doesn’t matter if the NFL does some shit that makes the sport .05 percent less or .05 percent more “safe,” if such things can even be properly quantified. What matters is that onside kicks fucking suck right now. If the NFL can’t sort out an easy, not-terribly-dramatic way of restoring them to their proper place in the sport, then they should just scrap the kickoff altogether and be done with it.
