Kickoffs are stupid and bad | Chart Party

well hey you want to see the dumbest kick off in the history of the NFL all right New Year's Day 2017 bills at Jets referee Jeff Triplett emerges from the pile and he is so happy he's such a happy man and you know why he's calling a play that as far as I can tell has never happened before in the NFL so to back up this is Mike Gillis Lee who's returned exactly one NFL kick in his entire life the ball went over his head so he keeps his hands off and lets it just roll into the end zone which is what you're supposed to do with a punt but of course this is not a punt it's a kick which means that it's a live ball to which both teams have equal right his nearest teammate Brandon Tate has fielded hundreds of kicks and if he had the time he'd probably say something like Mike listen you need to fall on that ball if you don't they are going to score a touchdown but he only has like half a second so he just goes like no bad but it's too late the Jets Doug Middleton falls on the ball for what goes down in the books as a kickoff recovery touchdown that vocabulary has never been used in any other NFL box score ever the play-by-play account seems to be at a complete loss it makes the kicker Knick Foulke look like some kind of God Nick folk kicks off 65 yards touchdown he's just out there kicking touchdowns this play is dumb but I don't mean this individual play I mean kickoffs in general they should be abolished because kickoffs are stupid and bad [Music] let's begin with the coolest possible outcome for a kick off the kick return touchdown these are cool right well if you stop and think about the coolest return TD you've ever seen I bet you're thinking of a punt return that's the fun one my favorite NFL play of all time was a punt return 2003 Broncos the Chiefs this play is completely ludicrous Dante Hall fields the punt and changes directions five times he's also benefiting from two of his teammates blocking guys from behind which is super illegal by some miracle the refs don't see either of them let's freeze it here Dante Hall is running backwards five yards from his own endzone this is supposed to end in disaster but it doesn't this 19 second Odyssey features eight missed tackles and ends with a game-winning touchdown but returns are cool like that kick returns are not this is a sample of the 30 kick return touchdowns between the 2013 and 2016 seasons I study the tape and I traced the route of the return man in each play originally I wanted to see whether I could identify some kind of trends some trick that made a return more successful but honestly the only advice I can give is to be cordarrelle Patterson he accounts for five of these thirty touchdowns all by himself he seems to have a sixth sense sometimes this one's pretty brilliant Patterson gets past the first wave of tacklers you'd expect him to keep running vertically outrun this defender and just sprint along the sidelines instead he swerves almost sideways right into the teeth of the defense I think this qualifies as some level of genius the defenders mo men are carrying them one way when Patterson goes the other way there's no answer he's gone but most returns look kind of like this one here's marques Lee from 2016 he sees a hole he runs through it that's it you want to talk scheme okay here's the two-man wedge here are two defenders coming up the side here's the two men coming over to block the two defenders and that's what gives Lee his Lane it's not all that interesting and almost all of these there's no reversal of field they don't even have to make anyone miss most of the time there's no creativity not a lot of technique most of the time there's no real decision-making it's only exciting because of the six points waiting at the end of it and the huge impact it can have on a football game but inherently speaking it's so boring they found a way to make touchdowns boring but see kickoffs don't work like the rest of football does most of the sport is really complicated football is made up of a bunch of little machines and each one is operated with lots of little dials and switches and over the years we've slowly learned how to use these machines in different ways when they spit out data they tell us all kinds of stories like this one the past machine passing touchdown rates were a little flat in the 70s until coach Don Coryell introduced his Air Koryo offense which emphasized deep routes and longer throws it was really successful a lot of teams picked it up and passing TVs had been up ever since usually when these machines go up and down we can understand why they do scoring dipped in the late 80s and then the NFL introduced rule changes that protected the quarterback and it's been on the rise ever since the extra point machine tells us another story that makes sense in 1974 the NFL moved the goalposts to the back of the end zone and kickers have missed a little more often they inevitably got better over the years and then the league moved the line of scrimmage back to the 15 and it's dropped again point being all these systems evolve and when they change we can understand why they change not this one this machine is busted [Music] in 2016 the average kick return made it to the 22 yard line which is almost exactly where it was nearly 50 years ago to get a better understanding of the success rate of kick returns I built a sample of almost every NFL kickoff return between 2011 and 2016 there were a few hundred I had to kick out because the play-by-play data was either incomplete or would take too much time to piece together I still ended up with a sample of fifteen thousand five hundred ninety eight including touchbacks and here's how they all ended up sorted from worst to best field position as you guessed touchdowns almost never happened about one time out of 300 but even a modest win for the return team is super rare they only get past their own 40 about two and a half percent at the time the kicking team doesn't have much chance of a big win either they only pin their opponent inside the 10 about 1 percent of the time the vast majority of kicks 76 percent put the ball between the 20 and the 30 this is largely thanks to touch backs which make up about half of all kickoff results the touchback automatically placed the ball at the 20 until 2016 when a rule change placed it at the 25 that's what these two plateaus are about but whether you start with the ball at the 20 or 25 or 40 or 15 how much does it really matter it does of course but not as much as I would have thought I also looked at the drives that began with these kickoffs and calculated the points that resulted from them clearly starting further up the field is generally better but the benefits are inconsistent and frankly kind of small so look if you start a drive between the 40 and the 49 you'll score an average of 2.1 points from this drive right but if you start a little further back you average a little more maybe this is a freak deviation but both these figures represent a sample of at least 700 plays maybe that's still not large enough fact remains the benefits of starting up here versus down there are not showing up on the scoreboard it just doesn't seem right if you start between the 40 and the 49 you score just barely more than you do if you start between the 25 and 29 even if your field position is cut in half or worse you're docked by less than 25 percent so even if you pull off one of these super rare kick returns you're only barely better off than if you just get to here which is basically the easiest thing in the world to do a good kick return just doesn't reward you nearly as much as it should it's like winning 20 bucks in Powerball it's just bad game design and I mean we can usually forgive a little bit of bad game design right football is about as old as a light bulb it be reasonable to live with a little bit of suboptimal design for the sake of tradition except the kickoff is the most dangerous play in an already dangerous sport kickoffs result in a concussion every 157 plays as compared to 1 and 241 in all other NFL plays now the lis tried to curb this in 2016 when it brought the touchback line out from the 20 to the 25 in order to incentivize more touchbacks it did that but it didn't matter a lot because the assumption that touchbacks are safe isn't all that accurate here's the touchback I selected completely at random you can see that when the blockers turn around block the return man hasn't caught the ball yet they don't know whether it's going to be a touch back or not so they have to play through and for the most part so does the opponent they're flying in at full speed and by the time the returner takes a knee they've already made impact with the blockers so even though the returner hasn't taken a step the most dangerous part of the play has already happened touch backs don't fix this matter of fact I'd argue that nothing fixes this the kickoff is too simple to fix it's like trying to adjust an old coffee maker either it works or it doesn't and it doesn't so to recap the kickoff is boring even the touchdowns are boring it's dangerous as it leads all plays and concussion rates the kickoff is so simple that there's very little room to get creative strategically unlike the rest of football the kickoff rarely produces any winner of any kind and it gives us more or less the same as almost of the time and even when a team does make a good return the reward is far too small if there even is a reward that's my argument for the abolition of kickoffs they are bad but if we did get rid of the kickoff there's something important that we need to account for we lose the onside kick the onside kick is important it allows the team to cheat the system keep the ball for an extra possession it's not likely to be successful if you run a surprise onside kick the success rate is 25% but if you run it when they're expecting it which they usually do it drops all the way to 5% but it's still possible and all that matters is that it's possible let's take this Cardinal Saints game which is like a lot of other games the red represents the Cardinals win probability after each play from 0% to 100% after a few peaks and valleys and Saints jump out to a 48 to 34 lead to get back into the game the card have to score two touchdowns in three minutes and change if they don't have the onside kick at their disposal there's no way they have time to do that their chances of winning would be virtually zero in the last few minutes of the game would be boring and completely irrelevant which from a fun gameplay perspective is bad but the onside kick tangles just enough of a carrot to make the end of the game meaningful when they do attempt it it's unsuccessful but it served its purpose the mere potential of the onside kick kept the game at least kinda interesting so yeah the onside kick is important the problem with it is that it is the ugliest play in sports for starters it doesn't make any intuitive sense the idea is to kick the ball to require 10 yards then somehow find a way to recover it if this bore any semblance to base natural logic the idea would be to just not kick it but you have to so you kick it intentionally badly intentionally weakly to expose a loophole in football's bureaucracy if you watch the entire thing as a sort of singular collective gesture it looks humiliating and just like it's big sibling the conventional kick off there's very little skill involved if footballs were round onside kicks would never be recovered they're pointed oblong shape the very same quality that makes them cut through the air and gives order to the passing game throws it into absolute chaos once it hits the ground it's impossible to judge on the fly which way of football is gonna bounce it's a total game of chance and it's impossible to look dignified while playing it see this play was forged in the fires of hell you know how I know that because around the turn of the 20th century there was serious debate as to what was more effective as an offensive weapon the forward pass or the onside kick I'm going to restate that because I need to make sure you're bearing witness to this with me at least some football writers and coaches genuinely believed that onside kicking the ball was a better way to gain yards and passing unbelievably a few teams could actually make this work several times in a row and just onside kick themselves down the field and this was possible because in its early days football was the worst sport in the world over the years the onside kick was phased out of the offensive game and is now mostly used only in cases of desperation but it's still here the NFL's rule book actually reminds me of something I use every day the New York City subway system it's monstrous and agent over the last hundred years or so it's gradually expanded to form a giant messy asymmetric patch word of tact on ideas that sometimes don't make any sense why are the NFL's overtime rules so bad that's just the way it is why doesn't the M train go a little further to make a complete loop that's just the way it is like this subway system the nfo adds and adjusts but it rarely subtracts it just leaves this grotesque array of appendices all over itself and the kickoff is the most hideous of them all in other words the kickoff is Chambers Street y'all been to the Chamber Street Station right oh you haven't okay you know what field trip I'm calling a field trip this is a chart party field trip [Music] the New York City subway system has 472 stations and if you ask me Chambers Street is the ugliest one I roll through it every day on the way to work so I figured that today I'd make a stop it was built in 1915 in 1931 they made adjustments to the station that rendered this side platform unnecessary so they locked it up and they never touched it again for 86 years and Counting it's just sat there in full view of commuters standing a dozen feet away crumbling it's right out of a horror film why have they allowed a station right outside City Hall to turn into this how could they possibly build a structure use it for 16 years and then let it decompose in public view for nearly a century couldn't they just clean it up a little bit or wall it off or knock it down or find some other use for it nope it has to sit here and rot that's just the way it is it's a stupid inseparable part of the system that's chamber Street and that's the kickoff [Music] well hey everybody we got effects this is a proposal submitted a few years ago by coach Greg Schiano years ago while coaching at Rutgers Schiano watched one of his players Eric LeGrand suffer an injury on a kick off the left him permanently paralyzed so he came up with a solution to replace the kick off instead of kicking off the team in question gets the ball at its own 30 the catch is that they don't get first in ten they're put automatically at fourth and 15 now what they'll probably choose to do at this point is pun which is good because a punt return is more interesting than a kick return it's also far safer instead of starting all the way across the field and slamming into each other at full speed they line up at scrimmage you know like you do in actual football the genius of this though is that it also provides a far superior replacement of the onside kick if they want to catch their opponent off guard they can run a fake punt and if they're up against the wall they can trot their quarterback out there and just straight up go for it historically teams have about a 22 percent chance of converting a fourth and 15 so it's kind of a long shot but it's still far more likely to succeed than the planned onside kick which i think is cool as an added bonus it's actual football that's interesting to watch instead of the ugliest stupidest looking spectacle and organized sports in which dice is played with human bodies the only suggestion I might make is to maybe give him fourth and 10 instead of fourth and 15 that way the odds that conversion rise to about 31% I like this because I prefer chaos but aside from that I love this plan it's simple obvious blessed dangerous and more fun so with the NFL ever adopt this rule it makes all the sense in the world so no [Music]

Channel: Secret Base

Views: 2,067,887

Keywords: nfl, kickoffs, buffalo bills, new york jets, dante hall, kansas city chiefs, cordarrelle patterson, onside kick, kick return touchdown, eric legrand, sb nation, chart party, jon bois

Id: t_SsIKgwvz4

Length: 16min 0sec (960 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2017