NFL Rumors: Kickoff rule change could move touchbacks to 35-yard line for 2025 season | News, results, highlights, statistics and rumors

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and the league’s competition committee are “considering” a rule change that would move touchbacks to the 35-yard line, Mark Maske reported Washington Post.

Before the 2024 season, a new rule went into effect requiring touchbacks from the 25-yard line to the 30-yard line.

The NFL and the competition committee “are not inclined to make any major changes during the season” and will likely wait until the 2025 season when they decide to adjust the rule again, Maske reported.

Maske’s report comes after Goodell said in a Tuesday appearance on NFL Network that he expected the NFL to make “a few new changes” to the adjusted kickoff rule Good morning football.

“We always said it was a work in progress. If I had to rate it, I would say it’s incomplete right now,” Goodell said (4:00 mark in video below). “Just on that note: We wanted to bring back more returns, but we wanted to do it safely. So we have more returns…that will give us more data to figure out if it’s working back to the same level of safety that we see on the scrimmage plays?

“So far it’s looking pretty good, but it’s still very early to tell and there really isn’t enough data yet. I think it will come out that we have brought safety back into play. And then I think we’ll get there.” I need to make a few changes to the kickoff that I think will lead to a lot more kickoff returns.

Goodell concluded: “You could take the touchback and move it to the 35. I think that would be an immediate game-changer… I think there will be a change whether we do it immediately or after the season. We” “There will be a competition committee in the next week or so.”

Since the kickoff was moved to the 35-yard line in 2010, kickoff return rates have plummeted and fell further when the NFL decided ahead of the 2023 season to count any fair catch inside the 25-yard line as a touchback to evaluate.

Those previous rule changes, made by the NFL in the name of player safety after the league announced that kickoffs were more likely to result in a concussion than on any other play, resulted in fewer than a quarter of kickoffs being returned in 2023 became.

About 29 percent of kickoffs have been returned so far in 2024, an increase from the 17 percent return rate during the same period last season, Maske said.

That’s still well below the NFL’s original projections, which predicted the new rule would result in a 55 percent kickoff return rate in 2024, according to ESPN’s Todd Archer.

The NFL’s current kickoff standard was added to the rulebook every year, meaning the competition committee must decide whether to extend or change the rule before the 2025 season. Whether the kickoff return rate increases as the season progresses could determine how likely touchbacks are to gain another five yards next fall.