NFL’s odd-looking new kickoff rules will come with own adjustment period

We get used to things, as sports fans, even if we are resistant in our ways. There are certain mysteries for which we never seek truth, such as: why can’t a quarterback, warming up on a sideline, receive the throw back to him by himself? Was there a rash of broken fingers one year in the ’60s? Weren’t football players supposed to be tougher in the good old days? 

Here’s another: in 2024, we walk with GPS in our pockets, yet we still measure first downs with chains, the verdict sometimes announced by the ultra-scientific trick of a referee holding his hands a few inches apart. In a game that often comes to a screeching halt in search of a 13th replay angle to determine a “football move,” we still blindly accept the measurement of a contraption that looks like it was made in someone’s basement. 

Which brings us to this new kickoff rule. 

If you watch enough football, you’ve seen your share of horrific collisions, humans running at top speed into each other. It’s maybe the most brutal part of a brutal sport. The answer, in recent years, was to virtually eliminate the kickoff, as they moved it up five yards, where any halfway-decent kicker could boot one to (and often through) the end zone. 

That was a different kind of brutal: it became boring. And in the NFL, the scale of boring-versus-bloody almost always shakes out to where the imperative is to wipe out the boredom before the blood. 

So now we have the “Dynamic Kickoff Rule.” The “set-up zone” and the “landing zone” have entered the football lexicon (welcome, lads, and take a seat next to neutral zone and red zone). We no longer have the placekicker jogging toward his teammates and picking up steam as he lays into the ball; as if kickers aren’t already segregated enough, he’s 25 yards behind the rest of his teammates, who now must line up on the receiving team’s 40.