NFL Reportedly Nixes Raiders’ Weird Kickoff Hack

The league is cracking down on their unique strategy.

Josh McDaniels’s first season in charge of the Raiders hasn’t gone great (Las Vegas is 5–8) but the team did come up with at least one smart idea during his tenure—and now it’s being told to knock it off. 

According to Football Zebras, the Raiders have been told they are no longer allowed to use a holder on kickoffs when also using a tee. The team had deployed a holder to balance the ball on the top edge of the tee, allowing kicker Daniel Carlson to get his foot under the ball and leading to kickoffs with more hang time. The league had initially told the Raiders that the move was within the rules but after further discussion has determined it to be illegal. 

“They clarified a rule a couple weeks ago, that you’re permitted to hold the ball on the top of the tee now, so we’ve got a good kicker, you can add hang time to the kick, and I think you saw Daniel use that to our advantage,” McDaniels said earlier, according to ProFootballTalk. “That’s the rules. They clarified it a couple weeks ago. If it helps us gain some type of advantage, we’ll try to do that.”

The height of the tee has a significant impact on kickoffs and has been the subject of all kinds of gamesmanship throughout NFL history, as Football Zebras explains, dating back to when kickers were permitted to build mounds of dirt to tee off from. In 1994, the league adopted a standard one-inch tee height. 

The Raiders got around this by placing the tip of the ball on top of the tee rather than inside it. The NFL tee has a cavity that positions the bottom tip of the ball one inch from the ground, surrounded by a raised edge to balance the ball upright. By placing the ball on the lip of the tee and using another player to hold it there, Carlson was able to get additional loft on his kicks, allowing the coverage team to get farther down the field before the ball was caught. Of Carlson’s 71 kickoffs, 26 were returned—for an average of 20 yards. That’s fourth among all kickers with at least five kickoffs returned. 

You have to admire the creativity of NFL teams trying to find ways to succeed by skirting around the rules. The Raiders just flew too close to the sun.