Yahoo Sports Can the NFL revive the ‘dead’ onside kick? What about fourth and 20 instead?
Here are five things to know as Week 16 of the NFL season approaches, including the league’s top five teams.
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Can the onside kick be fixed? The NFL plans to try.
The NFL appears to have landed on a concept to save the kickoff from pro football extinction. Next, it might attempt to restore some measure of relevance to the onside kick.
While NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Troy Vincent, the league’s executive vice president of football operations, continued to express optimism last week about the new kickoff format, Vincent said the league and its competition committee will scrutinize the onside kick during the upcoming offseason.
“We need to look at that,” Vincent said at the owners meeting in Irving, Texas. “That’s a dead play. That is a ceremonial play [with a] very low recovery rate.”
League leaders similarly referred to the kickoff as a dead, ceremonial play last season before devising the XFL-style kickoff alignment that went into effect this season. Now they’ll go back to work on the onside kick, perhaps soliciting input again from special teams coaches leaguewide.
Only 3 of 45 onside kicks have been recovered by the kicking team this season, a 6.7 percent success rate.
The onside kick necessarily had to change with this season’s new rules, given that the setup for the revamped kickoff alignment has 21 of the 22 players lined up on the same side of the field, with only the kicker on the other side. Under the new rules, a team can attempt an onside kick only while trailing in the fourth quarter. It must declare its intention, at which point the setup reverts to the traditional alignment. That eliminated the surprise onside kick, but in truth, it had already basically disappeared. There were only two surprise onside kicks last season.
More broadly, only 1 of 28 onside kicks, or 3.6 percent, was recovered by the kicking team through the Week 15 games last season. It was 2 of 42, or 4.8 percent, in the 2022 season through Week 15.
“Our effort should be to make every single play a competitive play,” Vincent said last week. “That includes that play, whether it’s [during the] first quarter or fourth quarter.”
It will be challenging, however, for the league and its competition committee to design a version of the onside kick that gives the kicking team an improved chance of success while still adhering to player safety standards. The onside kick is inherently a hazardous play - players on the kicking team crash into players on the receiving team in their bid to knock the football loose.
All of this could leave the NFL, the competition committee and team owners reconsidering the possibility of implementing a fourth-and-15 or fourth-and-20 alternative to the onside kick. The “kicking” team would send its offense on the field for a fourth-down play originating, based on past proposals, somewhere between its 20- and its 35-yard line. If the offense gets the yardage necessary for a first down, it would retain possession of the ball. If it fails on its attempt, the other team would take possession at that spot. The NFL tested a fourth-and-15 alternative from the 25-yard line in the Pro Bowl in 2020.
The fourth-down alternative has been proposed regularly by individual teams in recent years, but it never has gotten particularly close to generating the 24 votes among the 32 owners needed for approval. Some owners simply have regarded the measure as far too gimmicky.
“Where we started and the votes that it received and where it ended a year ago, there has been progress,” Vincent said. “But those are all the things that we should be exploring. If we’re going to have a ceremonial play the way it is today on the kickoff [with onside kicks], we’ve got to be creative. And I think our coaches, they can be creative enough to come up with a good, solid, competitive play to bring some excitement back in those situations.”
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NFL players, flag football and the 2028 Olympics
There could be a resolution next year as to whether NFL players will be able to participate in flag football at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, a league official said last week.
Some prominent players have expressed interest in participating as the sport is included in the Olympics for the first time. But there are issues related to injury risk and provisions in players’ contracts. There also are complications with the timetable and potential conflicts with teams’ training camps, particularly with the NFL Players Association seeking to reconfigure the offseason calendar. Under the NFLPA’s concept, voluntary offseason workouts in the spring could be eliminated and players could report to training camp earlier in the summer.
The NFL has incorporated a flag football game into its reimagined Pro Bowl. It has been supportive of the growth of flag football and seemingly would like for NFL players to be allowed to participate in the Olympics. The league has been discussing the issue with its teams, the NFLPA and governing bodies such as the International Federation of American Football.
Peter O’Reilly, the NFL’s executive vice president of club business, international and league events, said last week that a resolution is not imminent but progress is being made.
“There won’t be any near-term decision on this,” he said. “But I think there’s good momentum. … I would expect something in 2025 on that one.”
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Terry Pegula says ‘we all miss’ Kim
The Buffalo Bills added 10 limited partners to their ownership group last week, including a 10 percent investment by Arctos Partners that represented one of the NFL’s first two deals with private equity firms for minority ownership stakes. The Bills’ new part-owners also include Sue McCollum, the owner and chief executive of two beverage distribution companies, and Theresia Gouw, the co-founder and managing partner of venture capital firm Acrew Capital.
Terry Pegula, the Bills’ principal owner, noted those additions as he spoke with reporters during a break in last week’s owners meeting.
“One of the things I wanted to accomplish also was to bring in some women,” he said. “We’ve got two female investors that are very successful businesspeople. I’ve got three daughters that are involved in the team, hopefully more so in the future. And I think that’s a good thing for them to learn some business acumen from [them] and have some female input. When Kim went down, that was a big loss of influence on my daughters as far as the business side goes. She’s unable to be involved now.”
Kim Pegula, Terry’s wife and the team’s co-owner, suffered cardiac arrest in 2022. She suffered a brain injury related to her heart issue. Terry Pegula was named her guardian last year. At Bills training camp in July, she participated in the team’s post-practice huddle and breakdown.
“We all miss her, especially I do,” Terry Pegula said last week. “I think she was always the personal part of it, you know, sending out Christmas cards, making cookies for the coaches. She’d be up at 3 o’clock in the morning every Sunday when we played, making cookies for the coaches. We all miss that.”
Laura Pegula, a daughter of Terry Pegula from his previous marriage, has represented the Bills at NFL ownership meetings. Terry reportedly transferred a small ownership stake in the team to Laura to satisfy league policies related to succession planning. The Pegulas’ daughter Jessica is among the world’s top women’s tennis players. Jessica Pegula wrote in an essay last year for the Players’ Tribune that her mother always wanted her to be involved in the Bills and the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres, which the family also owns, following her tennis career.
Terry Pegula’s comments last week came with the Bills attempting to make a Super Bowl run after clinching their fifth straight AFC East title. They also are building a new stadium in Orchard Park, New York.
“Stadium costs are over budget,” Pegula said last week. “We’re on time. I’d rather be under budget and behind. But in today’s world, anybody who’s building anything will tell you they’re over budget because of inflation, the aftereffects of covid and supply chain and all that kind of stuff. It’s the increased costs of doing business.”
According to the Associated Press, cost overruns of more than $560 million have pushed the projected cost of the new stadium to more than $2.1 billion.
“We’ve actually built a stadium at the worst possible time you could in the last 30 years,” Pegula said.
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When will an 18-game season come?
The NFL is analyzing a prospective 18-game regular season ahead of formal negotiations with the NFLPA on the matter, Goodell said last week.
“The most important thing is to get an agreement with the Players Association. … We are doing analysis, I would say. But we are not formalizing any plans at this point,” Goodell said.
Lloyd Howell, the NFLPA’s executive director, told The Washington Post in July that the union had engaged in high-level discussions with the NFL about the implementation of an 18-game season. The talks had not progressed to formal negotiations, Howell said then.
A person familiar with the views of the league and the owners said last week that the deliberations over an 18-game season have been occurring quietly behind closed doors and a resolution is not imminent. A high-ranking official with one team said: “I do think it will happen. But there’s a lot of negotiating to be done on it.”
The collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2030 season and specifically prohibits the league from unilaterally extending the regular season to 18 games. In July, Howell left open the possibility that an 18-game season could go into effect, if players are in favor of it and if the union is able to secure what it might seek in negotiations with the league and owners, via an agreement between the NFL and NFLPA before the expiration of the current labor deal.
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Chiefs return to No. 1 as Lions slip
1. Kansas City Chiefs (13-1) - Patrick Mahomes has an ankle injury, and there’s a quick turnaround for Saturday’s game against the Texans, followed by another quick turnaround for the Christmas Day game at Pittsburgh. Fret all you want about how the Chiefs are winning, but 13-1 is 13-1. You know what’s worse than being the least impressive 13-1 team in history? Being the most impressive 12-2 team in history.
2. Philadelphia Eagles (12-2) - There’s rarely a dull moment, but the Eagles keep winning. Perhaps they will bicker their way to the Super Bowl.
3. Buffalo Bills (11-3) - Josh Allen is the MVP at this point. The Bills beat both No. 1 seeds, the Chiefs and Lions, in less than a month. But the leaky defense is a concern.
4. Detroit Lions (12-2) - They lost to the Bills even with Jared Goff throwing for 494 yards and five touchdowns. The Lions need some defensive players to get healthy and get back in the lineup as they try to fend off the Vikings in the NFC North and the Eagles in the race for the NFC’s top seed.
5. Minnesota Vikings (12-2) - They have pulled into a virtual tie with the Lions in the NFC North. The Vikings trail based on the head-to-head tiebreaker. But if they win out, including a Week 18 matchup with the Lions, they would win the division.
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And also …
The details of Bill Belichick’s contract while he coached the New England Patriots always were a closely guarded secret. That’s not the case now that he coaches at a public university.
His five-year deal with North Carolina pays him $10 million per season, including a $1 million salary and $9 million in supplemental income. The first three years are guaranteed; the final two are not. The contract contains bonuses worth as much as $3.5 million annually.
Belichick, 72, was asked during his introductory news conference Thursday about the prospect of leaving the school to return to the NFL and said, “I didn’t come here to leave.”
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