The NFL’s dynamic kickoff is officially here, and it is both new and, frankly, weird. We got a taste of the dynamic kickoff in the preseason, but it’s quite obvious now seeing the difference in preseason and regular-season return rates (71 percent vs. 33 percent, respectively) that most teams were only feeling the new rules out in August. So I watched all 172 kickoffs from Week 1 to try to figure out exactly how the NFL’s new experiment is working now that the games count. To be honest, I went into the process wanting to hate the dynamic kickoff (change is hard!) and came out of it actually loving it.

But before we get into the nine takeaways and trends I picked up from this deep dive into the dynamic kickoff, let’s recap what exactly is happening here, and why the NFL made this change.

First, the rules of this new kickoff aren’t all that simple. And while broadcast teams across the various networks did their best in Week 1 to provide copious explanations and graphics packages, it’s fair to say both die-hard and casual NFL fans are still going to need some time to adjust to the TV screen screaming “LANDING ZONE” at the start of every game.

I’ll do my best to explain the rules without getting too bogged down in the (sort of ridiculous) details. (If this doesn’t suffice, I actually do think the NFL’s football operations site does the trick. The Pittsburgh Steelers also have a pretty explainer video on YouTube.)

• The kicking team still kicks from its own 35-yard line. However, the kicking team’s 10 coverage players all have to line up 25 yards ahead, on the receiving team’s 40-yard line, and they can’t move until the returner either touches the ball or the ball touches the ground. And the kicker can’t cross the 50-yard line until a returner touches the ball or the ball touches the ground. 
• The returning team is required to have at least nine players lined up between their own 30- and 35-yard lines, which the NFL is calling the setup zone. At least seven of those players have to start with one foot on the 35-yard line. The other two players in the setup zone don’t have to be on the 30-yard line, but they have to line up outside the hashes. The returning team can then have a maximum of two returners who must line up inside the landing zone, which is anywhere between the goal line and the 20-yard line. Those two returners are the only players who are allowed to move before the ball is kicked. 

It looks like this:

• OK, now the ball is in the air. Any kick that is caught or lands in the designated landing zone must by rule be returned. If the kick lands short of the landing zone (which happened once in Week 1) or goes out of bounds before crossing the goal line (which happened twice), the returning team takes over on its own 40-yard line. In the case of a touchback, the offense starts at the 30-yard line instead of the 25-yard line (more on that later). If a returner lets a kick bounce in the landing zone but downs the ball in the end zone, the offense will start at just the 20-yard line. (This also happened twice in Week 1 on clever directional kicks from the New York Jets and Dallas Cowboys.) 
• I can hear you screaming: “But what about the onside kick?” The NFL hasn’t completely killed it as part of this dynamic return experiment, but they are now only allowed for teams trailing in the fourth quarter, and they have to announce that they’re going to attempt it. RIP, the Surprise Onside Kick, long may you live in Super Bowl history. 

Like I said, it’s not simple. So why is the NFL doing this to us (me)? Put plainly, the kickoff had become both too boring and too dangerous, and the NFL wanted to find a way to make the kickoff an important and exciting play, but also a safer play. It’s too early to tell if the league will actually accomplish that goal, but after the first 16 games of the season, we can draw some pretty significant conclusions about how this rule change will impact the 2024 season—if it will at all. 

This is The Ringer’s Definitive Guide to the Dynamic Kickoff:  

1. There Are Still a Lot of Touchbacks

The NFL was really excited after 71 percent of kickoffs were returned in the preseason. But we saw a major drop-off in the return rate in Week 1, when just 33 percent of kicks were returned. Still, that’s a 13 percent increase from Week 1 a year ago and the highest return rate since 2016 (37 percent). And the average kick return this season is 27.2 yards, which matches the highest average the league has had in Week 1 this millennium. I’m not convinced that means we’ll see more returns in coming weeks, however. According to TruMedia, the average starting field position after all kickoffs in Week 1 was the 29.3-yard line—less than a yard behind where the ball is placed after a touchback. 

Sure, we had a handful of splashy plays in Week 1, with three returns of over 40 yards, including a 96-yard touchdown return from Arizona Cardinals running back DeeJay Dallas, but the net average impact across the league at this point appears marginal at best. 

The biggest takeaway from reviewing every kickoff from Week 1 is that we’re still going to be seeing a lot of touchbacks. Leaguewide, there were 111 total touchbacks. According to NFL data analyst Michael Lopez, six teams didn’t have their kicker try to place the kickoff into the landing zone at all last weekend, sending every one of their kickoffs into the end zone. Plenty of coaches didn’t seem to think those extra 5 yards of field position were worth the risk of a return. We shouldn’t be surprised if even more teams avoid the landing zone entirely and boot for touchbacks in Week 2.

2. Creative Blocking Schemes Work

Perhaps the key to impactful returns under these new rules is using blockers in interesting ways. The Chicago Bears are getting some love from ESPN’s Ben Solak and Shawn Syed of Sumer Sports for popping a healthy return by effectively executing a double-team against a Tennessee player, and “pulling” a blocker from the front line to swing around to pick off an unblocked defender. That praise for the Bears is warranted because it was one of the cooler returns in all of Week 1. But they’re not the only team doing it! I charted eight other teams that used double-teams on return attempts. (And there could be more that try it in coming weeks, because we’ve yet to see a handful of teams execute any kind of return scheme since their opponents booted every kick into the end zone.) The Chiefs began the second half of their game against Baltimore with a similar counter concept, double-teaming a defender on the left side while looping another blocker all the way from the right side of the field to the left. The Chiefs’ execution wasn’t as sharp as what we saw from Chicago, as you can see below, but credit Kansas City for the ingenuity and effort in the first regular-season game of 2024. 

The touchdown by the Cardinals’ returner, Dallas, didn’t feature any double-teams, but they did pull a frontline blocker to one side of the field, ultimately creating a huge swath of open field for Dallas to run through. On an earlier return in that game, the Cardinals executed a double-team in the middle of the field and swapped their two off-line blockers in the setup zone to create favorable blocking angles on two separate unblocked defenders. The design ultimately didn’t pop a long return, but there’s definitely something here to build off moving forward. 

The Falcons, Jets, Commanders, and Raiders, among others, tried some frontline double-teams and/or pulling blockers, but none of them were as creative as whatever the hell the Broncos were trying on their first return of the season:

Denver cornerback Tremon Smith took a knee in the end zone for a touchback, but you can see that Sean Payton’s squad was trying something. There’s a double-team on the right side. The two off-line blockers fly to the left, and the far left blocker flies over to the right and crosses paths with one of the off-line blockers. A bunch of new blocking angles were created on this one; it’s a bummer we didn’t get to see it truly play out. 

There’s no way special teams coordinators across the league don’t copy this stuff from other teams right away. Hopefully the coordinators who ran vanilla man or zone blocking schemes in Week 1 are going to watch the tape from Week 1 and add different wrinkles to their return schemes.

3. Knuckle Bouncers Are in the Testing Phase

If teams weren’t booting the ball deep for a touchback or aiming the kicks to land outside of the left or right hashes, they were trying something I’m calling “knuckle bouncers.” Taking advantage of the fact that hang time doesn’t matter anymore because no one can move until the ball is touched or hits the ground, kickers can knuckle-bounce (it’s got a nice ring to it?) the ball into the landing zone and force the returners to scoop the notoriously oblong-shaped football up off the bounce. I counted more than 10 teams that attempted this knuckle-bounce strategy, though the Bills and Cardinals should come with an asterisk on this list because the wind in Buffalo dramatically affected the kickers’ ability to accurately place their kicks throughout the game. The Bills were forced to employ a holder on multiple occasions to keep the ball upright, and accidentally (we assume) kicked the ball out of bounds on one of their attempts. Cardinals kicker Matt Prater even mistakenly kicked short of the landing zone for a penalty, as well. 

The Seahawks technically tried the knuckle bounce, too, but both instances came on what the NFL is calling a “safety kick”—a kickoff taken from the 20-yard line after a safety. (I still can’t believe a team took two safeties in the first half of a game.) The Cowboys also knuckled five of their kickoff attempts, but only one of them bounced on the ground in the landing zone. … That’s because their kicker, Brandon Aubrey, has an absolute cannon of a leg—he nailed a 66-yard field goal on Sunday that was unfortunately nullified by penalty—and can whip knuckleballs that sail far into the landing zone or even into the end zone. Still, Aubrey’s powerful kicks resulted in two separate bobbled catches that slowed the Browns returner quite a bit, and another one scared Browns returner Jaelon Darden enough that he let it roll into the end zone, which put the touchback at the 20-yard line, not the 30-yard line, under the new rules. 

That’s an extremely under-discussed benefit of any bouncing kick; if the returner is spooked by the trajectory of the bounce and the ball rolls through the back of the end zone or is downed in the end zone, the offense will start the ensuing drive at the 20-yard line! That’s a 10-yard difference, a substantial change in field position. 

My guess is the teams that are willing to place the ball in the landing zone will continue to test these types of knuckle bouncers (if I say it enough, maybe it’ll stick) and, hell, even try to mimic Aubrey if they have a kicker with that kind of juice. But it’s still not a foolproof strategy. Multiple returners scooped balls off the bounce and returned the kicks beyond the 30-yard line.

4. Directional Kicks Are a Work in Progress, Too

The best directional kick of the weekend goes to the Jets’ Greg Zuerlein, who placed a knuckler in the landing zone before it bounced out of bounds in Monday’s game against the 49ers. That kick is an example of a peak outcome from a far left or far right directional kick. There were some other solid, if not good, outcomes from directional kicks from Denver’s Wil Lutz and Miami’s Jason Sanders where returners were unable to run past the 30-yard line. However, there were also plenty of examples where a directional kick was either too far to the right or too far to the left, and returners had plenty of room to break for big gains beyond the 30-yard line. 

The teams that had success kicking directionally did so against return units that were unprepared to adjust their blocking concepts accordingly. The teams who didn’t ace the directional kicking game got beat by opposite-direction runs or prepared double-teams on the edge.

There is proof of concept that directional kicking can work and I would expect teams to continue to experiment with it, but I think the highest percentage of kicks into the landing zone will still hit a lot closer to the middle of the field in order to allow coverage units to maximize all of the players they have on the field.

5. A Lot of Different Players Are Returning Kicks (but Velus Jones Jr. Is Not)

Because the dynamic kickoff more closely resembles a running play, it has the potential to change who coaches will line up as returners. It’s no longer a job just for pure speedsters. I counted 70 different players who lined up in the landing zone as an eligible returner in Week 1, and it appears the majority of the league has decided running backs are the preferred players to handle these new kickoff returns. 

By my charting, 25 teams tried at least one running back as a returner in Week 1, and eight of those teams exclusively used running backs—most of them backups. Three teams, the Lions, Jaguars, and Colts, exclusively used wide receivers on returns, and four teams had a cornerback line up for at least one of their kick return attempts. (The Packers are the only team that used two cornerbacks on kickoff returns, two-time All-Pro returner Keisean Nixon and Corey Ballentine.) Predictably, the Saints were the only team to use a tight end (Taysom Hill), while the 49ers and Chiefs were the only teams to have a fullback on kickoff return duty (Kyle Juszczyk and Carson Steele, respectively.)

The Bills, 49ers, Saints, Cowboys, and Bears were the only five teams that used more than two unique returners in their Week 1 games. The Bills swapped running back Ty Johnson for rookie running back Ray Davis after Johnson left the game with a knee injury he suffered while playing on offense. The 49ers swapped out their primary return duo, Juszczyk and wide receiver Deebo Samuel, for rookie wide receiver Jacob Cowing and rookie running back Isaac Guerendo in garbage time on Monday night. The Cowboys gave running back Deuce Vaughn a rep late in their blowout win over Cleveland, and the Saints did the same in their bludgeoning of the Panthers with running back Jamaal Williams. And the Bears benched returner Velus Jones Jr. for wide receiver DeAndre Carter for muffing and kicking the ball to the other team on the same play. Honestly, it was glorious. (Unless you’re a Bears fan.)

6. Coverage Scheme Innovation Is Lagging

I’ll be honest with you. When watching 172 kickoffs back-to-back-to-back in the middle of the night, the kickoff coverage strategies at some point start to blur together. Every team has to put 10 players on the opponent’s 40-yard line, usually with four players outside the hashes and two inside, and those players sprint forward to try to beat their blocks while maintaining lane integrity (barring a directional kick to the far left or right). There are some differences in post-kick assignments, like two players on either side of the hashes purposefully staying back to serve as the last line of defense, but it’s mostly the same shit over and over. No one seems to be trying anything too innovative in coverage just yet. I thought the pre-snap alignments for the kickoff coverage units were boring … until I saw whatever the hell the Las Vegas Raiders were doing: 

Las Vegas is the only team I saw bunching its kickoff defenders in pairs like this, and if Los Angeles Chargers returner Derius Davis didn’t run straight into the back of his own teammate and instead actually hit the wide-open lane in the middle of the field, I think he would have taken this back for six. 

The Raiders booted every subsequent kickoff into the end zone for a touchback … but man, the odd pre-kick alignment combined with terrible execution was a mess. It’ll be interesting to see whether they roll out the same alignment in Week 2 or go back to the drawing board, though as a proud member of Raider Nation, I’m hoping for the latter. 

7. The Saints and Blake Grupe Could Save the Dynamic Kickoff

You read that right. Saints kicker Blake Grupe could be the hero the NFL needs to keep the dynamic kickoff exciting and fun.

So who is this guy? He’s a 5-foot-7, 156-pound (!) second-year undrafted kicker who played five years at Arkansas State before finishing his college career at Notre Dame. He’s not all that much bigger than Pommel Horse Guy, and he’s performing equally as well when it matters. 

Thanks in large part to the Panthers defense’s complete inability to stop the Saints offense, allowing scores on New Orleans’s first 10 possessions, Grupe got plenty of work. His 10 kickoffs were the most of any kicker in Week 1. I watched each of Grupe’s kicks at least five times, and by my charting, every single one of his first nine kicks landed either at or inside of the 5-yard line, with a few of them landing almost exactly on the goal line. The Panthers returned only three of the six kickoffs to the 30-yard line or beyond; the average starting field position for the Panthers on returned kicks was the 27-yard line. 

If there’s going to be any advantage for kicking teams hitting the landing zone consistently, teams might need to follow the Grupe model. That’s easier said than done, though. Watch the kid. He’s a robot. His form is so consistent, it’s like prime Tiger Woods putting it on the green from 100 yards out.

That said, as much as I want to buy a Grupe jersey right now, let’s see what kind of success he and the Saints coverage unit have against a better football team, because …

8. The Panthers Stink at Kickoffs

Lest you think Bryce Young is the only thing wrong with the Panthers, I present to you: their kickoff unit. It’s hard to think of anything more fitting than this: The Panthers are the only team in the NFL that started every kick return with their backs to the kicking team.

It didn’t work, obviously, much like everything else in Carolina. Grupe gave them nine (!) landing zone opportunities to figure it out (Grupe sailed one kick into the end zone), and they still did dumb stuff like this. While everyone compared the new kickoff to running the ball all offseason, Carolina essentially opted to turn its back to the line of scrimmage. I don’t know how much longer my Ringer colleague Steven Ruiz and every other sad Panthers fan can keep pounding.

9. The Dynamic Kickoff Is Cool!

Some teams run away from change (cough, cough, Carolina). Others run toward it. I was in an all-out sprint in the opposite direction of the dynamic kickoff during the first NFL Sunday of the year, but my peek under the hood has me excited to key in on all of the different teams trying to innovate, even if some of those ideas don’t work inside the new funky rules. What will Week 2 bring? I can’t wait to grind the special teams all-22.

Austin Gayle