{"id":184710,"date":"2025-10-02T09:33:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T09:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/184710\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T09:33:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T09:33:07","slug":"blocked-field-goals-70-yard-threats-and-chaotic-kickoffs-the-foot-is-back-in-football-nfl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/184710\/","title":{"rendered":"Blocked field goals, 70-yard threats and chaotic kickoffs, the foot is back in football | NFL"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vic Fangio, the Philadelphia Eagles\u2019 crafty defensive coordinator, took great pride watching his defense force a third-down incompletion Sunday, leaving the Tampa Bay Buccaneers<\/a> 47 yards from the Eagles\u2019 goal line with only four seconds left in the first half.<\/p>\n

In the old days, that might have led to a Hail Mary pass into the end zone. But instead Bucs kicker Chase McLaughlin trotted on to the field and calmly belted a 65-yard field goal through the super-heated Florida sky, tied for the second-longest in NFL<\/a> history.<\/p>\n

McLaughlin later booted a 58-yard field goal to put the Bucs eight points behind with 12 minutes in the game. Philadelphia would escape with a 31-25 win, but Fangio fingered one culprit: the designated kicking balls, or \u2018K\u2019 balls, that each team is allowed to prepare for use in games.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn years past,\u201d Fangio said at a news conference Tuesday, \u201cthe officials would rub them down or other people would rub them down, and you\u2019d play with them. Now the balls are in-house all week and they kick those balls that they\u2019ve had, and nobody else touches them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Referring to the Cowboys\u2019 brilliant kicker, Brandon Aubrey, Fangio said: \u201cThe guy in Dallas is going to hit a 70-plus yarder this year. You can just book it \u2026 I mean, who thought they would hit a 65-yarder the other day? So it has drastically changed the game, the kicking game and the field goal. Guys have longer range than they used to.\u201d<\/p>\n

The NFL appears to have (successfully) put more of the foot back into American football. With several rules changes in recent years, NFL special-teams play has become a substantially bigger factor in determining the outcome of games. This is seen as a good thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe NFL wants more points? There it is,\u201d Michael Clay, the Eagles\u2019 special teams coach, said Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Those newfangled kickoff formations might still look contrived (the president of the United States himself is on record<\/a> as saying they are \u201cbad for the game of football\u201d), but, with the rules tweaked even more so again this year, they have dramatically resulted in more action. Teams average 23.4 points per game, second-highest in history.<\/p>\n

Through four weeks, per Pro Football Reference, NFL teams are averaging 103.2 yards in kickoff returns per game, the highest ever \u2013 and more than four times the average of 24.9 yards per team in 2023, after which the NFL altered its whole kickoff procedure<\/a>. Only 16.5% of kickoffs in 2025 have resulted in touchbacks, compared with 73% in 2023.<\/p>\n

Most notably, the league encourages kickoffs dropping in a \u201clanding zone\u201d that stretches 20 yards out from the goal line. As a result, kickoffs are deftly placed, looking much more like coffin-corner punts. There was a time when kickers simply blasted kickoffs out of the end zone for touchbacks \u2013 but doing that now results in the ball being placed at the 35-yard line.<\/p>\n

A week earlier, in a 33-26 victory over the Los Angeles Rams, the Eagles had some serious problems fielding the wobbly, knuckling, bouncing kickoffs launched by Joshua Carty, the Rams second-year kicker, with five Philadelphia drives starting at or inside the 20-yard line.<\/p>\n

But kickers can\u2019t merely kick ground balls to their opponents and hope for bobbles. Kickoffs must first hit the surface, or be caught, inside that landing zone. After the Arizona Cardinals<\/a> had tied last Thursday\u2019s game against the Seattle Seahawks with 28 seconds to play, Chad Ryland drilled a kickoff that landed one yard short of the landing zone.<\/p>\n

The penalty was severe: The Seahawks got the ball at the 40, less than 20 yards outside the range of kicker Jason Myers. After a 22-yard pass completion and a 4-yard run, Myers \u2013 who\u2019d earlier missed a 53-yard try \u2013 drilled a 52-yard attempt to give Seattle a 23-20 victory.<\/p>\n

When asked at his post-game news conference what Ryland was trying to accomplish there, Arizona coach Jonathan Gannon said, \u201cKeep it in play. That\u2019s one of the things we talk about late in the game there with the amount of timeouts, time, what they need at the line. We were trying to burn off some time there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The livelier kickoffs seem to have rubbed off on the rest of the kicking game. There have been 16 blocked punts, field goals and extra points already this year. Dallas blocked an extra-point attempt Sunday in a 40-40 tie with Green Bay, with Cowboys defensive back Markquese Bell returning the ball 80 yards for a safety, or two points for Dallas. That was only the 10th time that has happened since it was first allowed in 2015.<\/p>\n

Josh Blackwell blocked Daniel Carlson\u2019s 54-yard field-goal attempt with 33 seconds left to enable the Chicago Bears<\/a> to hang on for a 25-24 victory over Las Vegas. A week after blocking two field goals against the Rams \u2013 the second of which could have won the game for Los Angeles but resulted in a game-ending Eagles touchdown \u2013 Philadelphia blocked a punt against Tampa Bay and returned that for an early TD.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Eagles veteran kicker Jake Elliott kept pinning Tampa Bay deep with deft kickoffs inside the landing zone. Tampa Bay started six drives after his kickoffs at the average of the 22-yard line. His first kickoff fell in the landing zone and rolled into the end zone for a touchback. Under those conditions, the Bucs had to start from their 20-yard line.<\/p>\n

\u201cJake does an unbelievable job in trying to perfect anything he does,\u201d Clay said. \u201cWhether it\u2019s a field goal, whether it\u2019s kickoff, a lot of work goes into it in terms of behind the scenes. We went out there, I know it was raining last Wednesday, but we were still able to go outside and just get a feel for it. Then a lot of it just comes down to confidence. Jake was able to say at the end of the week, \u2018I\u2019m pretty confident in this kick.\u2019 That\u2019s all I needed to hear to implement it, but also it\u2019s a good changeup. You saw a couple low liners, then you saw some up in the air.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe kickoff team has done a really good job thus far in the first four weeks of covering. Any way we could get the starting point for the defense inside the 25 on kickoff is pretty good for us, so we\u2019re going to just try and keep evolving it, try to keep getting better at it. Just because of the kick, we have to keep working on our technique and fundamentals from a kickoff-cover standpoint.\u201d<\/p>\n

To curtail those bone-crushing, full-speed collisions, coverage teams for the so-called \u201cDynamic Kickoff\u201d line up at the receiving team\u2019s 40-yard line, 25 yards in front of the kicker. So far, only one kickoff has been returned for a touchdown, by New England\u2019s Antonio Gibson.<\/p>\n

Because of the new kickoff formation, a losing team must declare its intention to try an onside kick, which kind of takes away the surprise factor (although the receiving team has a pretty good idea what is coming). Only two onside kicks have been recovered so far in 2025.<\/p>\n

On the whole, though, the kicking game has been revitalized. Even extra points, a 33-yard attempt since 2015, are not gimmes, with a success rate of 95.9%, compared with 99.3% in 2014. But, hey, the NFL can always tinker with those rules in the offseason.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vic Fangio, the Philadelphia Eagles\u2019 crafty defensive coordinator, took great pride watching his defense force a third-down incompletion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184711,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,593,85],"class_list":["post-184710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}