The wording is weird/incomplete (nature of Twitter). Does this mean that the player can be chosen at any time up to the end of Week 6? Later? How long must that player then sit out? 6 weeks? More? Less?
Proposed Rule Changes for 2016
- Thread starter DanoooME
- Start date
Since you can know declare someone IR-DTR after the fact, can you also shift someone from DTR to traditional IR? That would be helpful with roster management as the season progresses
The way it reads to me is that no one is IR-DTR anymore. You put someone on IR and can return one player after min 6 weeks. You wouldn't transfer someone from DTR to IR because you won't have anyone on DTR anymore. You simply get to choose which player on IR to bring back at some point.
This is very valuable because in the past you were gambling when putting someone on DTR that you wouldn't lose someone more valuable in the next few weeks. Now that you don't have to worry about losing the designation you can truly save it for your best player. Great rule change.
Prepare to be beyond shocked:
Tweet from Michael David Smith:
Tweet from Broncos kicker Brandon McManus:
Quotes from a piece in the Chicago Tribune:
I think it will obviously vary from team to team and situation to situation. But there is certainly a lot of chatter from insiders that this may have the opposite of the NFL's intended effect. My understanding is that the NCAA saw an increase in touchbacks when they changed the rule, but the NFL has much more talented kickers and better organized coverage units. I'm not sure it's a fair comparison.
I guess we'll see what happens come this fall.
There are obviously a ton of big leg kickers now who can boom the ball out of the endzone with relative ease. I wonder how many of those have the ability to finesse the ball to inside the 5yd line?
I think Ghost will excel at this since he has a lot of loft on his kicks. He should be able to adapt just fine. Kickers that kick more on a line will likely have a harder time.
I think Ghost will excel at this since he has a lot of loft on his kicks. He should be able to adapt just fine. Kickers that kick more on a line will likely have a harder time.
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2016/03/23/league-officials-admit-touchback-rule-may-have-unintended-consequences/
Repeating some points from Soxy Brown.
Repeating some points from Soxy Brown.
I think less of Troy Vincent than I do Roger Goodell.
Makes total sense to me. You go into a meeting hoping for one outcome (fewer returns) and leave with a rule that you acknowledge might have the exact opposite effect. NFL gonna NFL
If kickers could reliably drop the ball inside the 5 and the coverage unit could reliably tackle the kick returner,I bet they'd already be doing it with the old touchback rule. Big returns, even if they don't go all the way for TDs, can be huge factors in a game. For this reason your typical risk-averse NFL coach is going to want the kicker to get those touchbacks. On the other side, other than premier return threats like Hestert, most returners are going to be told even more often now to kneel down in the end zone.
The bolded isn't really supported by the numbers. There were only three teams last season that averaged less than 20 yards per kickoff return. It would have made no sense for kicking teams to attempt so-called "mortar" kicks because, on average, they would have lost field position that way. Only nine teams last season averaged more than 25 yards per kickoff return (ten if you include the Giants and their 24.9 average). Five yards may not seem like a big difference, but it's changed the math. Now it does make sense to try and kick it inside the 5-yard line but not into the endzone, at least in some situations. Those situations have always existed, they were just few and far between. This new rule will create many more situations where the kicking team will be incentivized to attempt a "mortar" kick. How it plays out in practice is another story (NFL coaches in general are notoriously risk averse, slow to adapt, and seem to have trouble grasping basic math and probabilities), but the numbers lead to a fairly obvious conclusion.
Even if a kicker could reliably land the ball exactly on the one-inch line every single time, it would have made no sense to attempt that under the old rule, except against the three teams who averaged less than 20 yards per return. Under the new rule, you should be doing that against about 2/3 of the league. So I don't buy the argument that kickers would already be doing this if they were capable of it. Whether or not they are capable is another matter, which I am not qualified to answer (paging @IdiotKicker). But they have an entire off-season to practice it, if they'd like.
Since the longest NFL kickoff reruns on record are over 100 yards, don't the average return stats include yards into the end zone? E.g., a 20-yard return from a kick 3 yards into the end zone results in the ball on the 17.
If kickoff returns are so fucking dangerous, why let people return kickoffs at all? Why not just put the kicker back at the 15 or whatever, have him kick it as far as he can and have the team start there?
Right, but that doesn't change the math. If a team averages 20 yards per return, it doesn't matter whether they field it 5 yards deep or at the 5 yard line. They still average 20 yards per return. I'm sure teams have more granular data that show it does, in fact, matter where the kick is fielded in terms of how successful their returns are. But we don't have access to that data without going through every kick return. Which I'm not about to do.
I guess I don't see your point. Your contention was that teams would already be intentionally kicking the ball inside the 5 yard line, but not further than the goalline, if they were capable of doing so. The numbers say that would have been a bad strategy on average, as it would have given their opponents field position beyond the 20 yard line more often than not. They would have been better off booting it as far as they could and hoping for a touchback.
I'm not saying teams are going to "mortar" kick it every single time. But I would say the likelihood of those kicks increases with this new rule.
And this is really the crux of the issue for many of us. The NFL is making this change under the auspices of player safety when it's blatantly obvious that they don't really care about player safety at all. This is a token gesture, at best. At worst, it's a misguided attempt to increase player safety while having the opposite effect in practice.
I kind of liked Brandon McManus' suggestion on twitter, which was to award the kicking team a point every time they boot the ball through the uprights on a kickoff. The NFL claims they care about player safety, and we know they love scoring plays. Best of both worlds with that rule, right?
Take a look at this study of 2012 data by Kevin Rudy. In that season there were 2,037 kickoffs that went into or completely through the end zone. Of these 2,037, the return man took the ball out of the end zone 893 times.
For these 893 returns, regardless of how deep {0-9 yards} into the end zone the kick traveled, on average the return man made it out past the 20-yard line.
Of course, it's not a random event for a return man to bring a kickoff out of the end zone. A return man elects to bring the ball out and not kneel down, presumably having made the judgment that he has a good chance of getting out past the 20-yard line. In addition, it is possible that the kickoff coverage team sometimes may be electing to "play it safe" on returns out of the end zone and deploy personnel to cede returns out close to the 20-yard-line in order to to protect against returns out to the 30-yard-line and beyond. These elements of choice skew the average yards-per-kickoff-return statistic. We need to see the average yards per kickoff return on the kickoffs received on the 1-yard-line to the 10-yard-line, where choice is largely (if not completely) eliminated.
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That is interesting stuff that I had never seen before, thanks for posting.
Like you elude to, it's hard to tease out all of the variables. There could be (and almost certainly is) an inherent selection bias in the data. Teams that elect to return kickoffs out of the endzone are doing so believing that they are more likely than not to get an ROI on that decision, resulting from a combination of confidence in their own return team and a lack of confidence in the opposition's coverage team. Whereas teams that lack confidence in their return team, or fear their opponent's coverage team, are more likely to take the touchback. Will the five yards make a difference in those decisions? Judging solely on the data in the chart above, those five yards would absolutely seem to make a difference between taking a knee and running it out of the endzone.
What's interesting to me is how this changes the dynamic behind the kickoff. It feels like the NFL only thought about the incentive structure on the return side, and didn't consider the incentive change for the kicking team. Football is a game of constant push-pull, act-react decisions. I can't help but think that the NFL assumed kickoff strategy would stay constant and kick return strategy would be the only thing altered, without considering the obvious conclusion that any rule change is going to lead to strategy changes on both sides.
Like you elude to, it's hard to tease out all of the variables. There could be (and almost certainly is) an inherent selection bias in the data. Teams that elect to return kickoffs out of the endzone are doing so believing that they are more likely than not to get an ROI on that decision, resulting from a combination of confidence in their own return team and a lack of confidence in the opposition's coverage team. Whereas teams that lack confidence in their return team, or fear their opponent's coverage team, are more likely to take the touchback. Will the five yards make a difference in those decisions? Judging solely on the data in the chart above, those five yards would absolutely seem to make a difference between taking a knee and running it out of the endzone.
What's interesting to me is how this changes the dynamic behind the kickoff. It feels like the NFL only thought about the incentive structure on the return side, and didn't consider the incentive change for the kicking team. Football is a game of constant push-pull, act-react decisions. I can't help but think that the NFL assumed kickoff strategy would stay constant and kick return strategy would be the only thing altered, without considering the obvious conclusion that any rule change is going to lead to strategy changes on both sides.
I entirely agree with you on this. I just believe their thinking is going to fortuitously match up with what results.
What's the expected point difference between 1st and 10 at the 20 and 1st and 10 at the 25?
I can find charts and see a trend line, but not the actual numbers. My Google-Fu is failing me.
Then you're giving a greater advantage to teams that have more injured players. Wouldn't a fairer solution be roster expansion (if money wasn't as much of a factor)?
That's the reason we have deepish rosters in our fantasy baseball league with no DL slots. We don't want to reward owners for drafting injury-prone players. 53-man rosters,to me, are deep as it is, considering you have 7 inactives on gameday anyway.
Is it really an advantage for a team to use limited resources (salary in a league with a salary cap) on injury prone players?
There's a huge issue with selection bias in this sort of analysis - you should expect the return average to be longer than 20, because returners aren't going to take it out unless they're pretty sure they can get near the 20. You kick a high lofty kick that lands a yard into the endzone, they're going to kneel instead getting killed at the 10.
I'd bet with the new rule, the average return goes up to around 25, as returners aren't going to take the ball out unless they see a gap in the coverage or something.
Over the last 5 years, starting at the 20 yields an average of 1.51 points per drive. Starting at the 25 gets you 1.68 points per drive. Average number of possessions per team in a game is around 12 so that 5 yard difference is just over 2 points per game, or enough for the Pats to beat the Broncos in the AFCG.
How many average kickoffs are there per game? That's the math that you need to do no?
The average team had maybe 80 kickoffs last year, 5 per game. That .17 difference is .85/game
So the "best kickoff kicker in the league" may now be Adam Vinatieri who can reliably kick it to the 3 every kick!
I'm not giving an advantage to anybody. I'm sure every team would like to have an additional DL slot to use for an injury that will keep someone out multiple weeks but not season-ending.
If the rosters expand out beyond 53, then yes more spots should be given. It should be proportionate to the roster size.
Bob Holtzman ESPN
NFL owners announce their first rule change of the day: game officials can now consult with the officiating dept at the league office on things like game clock accuracy, rules applications, proper down, etc. They tested this during playoffs last season and liked it.
NFL owners announce their first rule change of the day: game officials can now consult with the officiating dept at the league office on things like game clock accuracy, rules applications, proper down, etc. They tested this during playoffs last season and liked it.