What Final Data From 2024 Season Shows About Impact of NFL's New Kickoff Rules

The NFL's grand experiment didn't exactly yield conclusive results.

A general overall view of the opening kickoff between the Arizona Cardinals and the Los Angeles Rams / Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

The NFL made arguably its most sweeping change to the game of football in years this past offseason by introducing the "dynamic kickoff" in an effort to inspire more exciting kick returns while lowering the risk of serious injury. The unusual setup, with the kicker lined up many yards behind the kicking team and the landing zone highlighted on the broadcast, was a bit strange to get used to. But eventually viewers adjusted, as did teams.

With Week 18 wrapping up on Sunday night, the first season of the dynamic kickoff concluded. On Tuesday, ESPN's Kevin Seifert provided some stats to show how much of an impact the change had on the number of returns over the course of the year. Unfortunately for the league, not a ton changed.

Per Seifert, 32.8% of all kickoffs were returned, while 64.3% were touchbacks. It marks the second-lowest return rate since 2000, behind only the 2023 season.

So the NFL did somewhat succeed. There were more kickoffs returned in 2024 than in 2023, which saw a dismal 21.8% kickoff return rate. But both are still historically low compared to the last 20 odd years of play.

This will likely lead to some more tweaks over the offseason from the competition committee. But it's hard to envision more kickoffs getting returned unless a truly drastic change is made, like reverting touchbacks back to the 20-yard line. Barring that, teams will continue to believe that a touchback is a much better risk-reward proposition than returning kicks.

The experiment did not fail. But nor did it solve all the NFL's woes with kickoffs.

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