Vic Fangio, the Philadelphia Eagles’ crafty defensive coordinator, took great pride watching his defense force a third-down incompletion Sunday, leaving the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 47 yards from the Eagles’ goal line with only four seconds left in the first half.
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 history.
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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 ‘K’ balls, that each team is allowed to prepare for use in games.
“In years past,” Fangio said at a news conference Tuesday, “the officials would rub them down or other people would rub them down, and you’d play with them. Now the balls are in-house all week and they kick those balls that they’ve had, and nobody else touches them.”
Referring to the Cowboys’ brilliant kicker, Brandon Aubrey, Fangio said: “The guy in Dallas is going to hit a 70-plus yarder this year. You can just book it … 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.”
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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.
“The NFL wants more points? There it is,” Michael Clay, the Eagles’ special teams coach, said Tuesday.
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Those newfangled kickoff formations might still look contrived (the president of the United States himself is on record as saying they are “bad for the game of football”), 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.
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Through four weeks, per Pro Football Reference, NFL teams are averaging 103.2 yards in kickoff returns per game, the highest ever – and more than four times the average of 24.9 yards per team in 2023, after which the NFL altered its whole kickoff procedure. Only 16.5% of kickoffs in 2025 have resulted in touchbacks, compared with 73% in 2023.
Most notably, the league encourages kickoffs dropping in a “landing zone” 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 – but doing that now results in the ball being placed at the 35-yard line.
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.
But kickers can’t 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 had tied last Thursday’s game against the Seattle Seahawks with 28 seconds to play, Chad Ryland drilled a kickoff that landed one yard short of the landing zone.
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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 – who’d earlier missed a 53-yard try – drilled a 52-yard attempt to give Seattle a 23-20 victory.
When asked at his post-game news conference what Ryland was trying to accomplish there, Arizona coach Jonathan Gannon said, “Keep it in play. That’s 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.”
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.
Josh Blackwell blocked Daniel Carlson’s 54-yard field-goal attempt with 33 seconds left to enable the Chicago Bears to hang on for a 25-24 victory over Las Vegas. A week after blocking two field goals against the Rams – the second of which could have won the game for Los Angeles but resulted in a game-ending Eagles touchdown – Philadelphia blocked a punt against Tampa Bay and returned that for an early TD.
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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.
“Jake does an unbelievable job in trying to perfect anything he does,” Clay said. “Whether it’s a field goal, whether it’s 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, ‘I’m pretty confident in this kick.’ That’s all I needed to hear to implement it, but also it’s a good changeup. You saw a couple low liners, then you saw some up in the air.
“The 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’re 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.”
To curtail those bone-crushing, full-speed collisions, coverage teams for the so-called “Dynamic Kickoff” line up at the receiving team’s 40-yard line, 25 yards in front of the kicker. So far, only one kickoff has been returned for a touchdown, by New England’s Antonio Gibson.
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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.
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.
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