This past Thursday night marked the beginning of Week One of the 2018-19 college football season. The first televised game took place between The University of Central Florida (UCF) and The University of Connecticut (UConn). Football fans across the country tuned in to see the first game of the weekend, however the real action would have to wait.
Only seconds into the game there would be a nine-minute delay while UCF’s Aaron Robinson was taken off the field on a stretcher. Robinson suffered a scary injury while attempting to make a tackle on the opening kickoff of the game. Therefore, only seconds into the season football fans everywhere were left to wonder, is it time to get rid of kickoffs?
The kickoff is guaranteed to happen at least once at the beginning of each half and the average football game contains between 10 and 11 kickoffs according to a 2013 study done by sportsonearth.com. A kickoff is one of the most dangerous plays in the game because of the nature in how it is set up. The team that is kicking off lines up at its own 30 yard line to get a five yard running start as the ball is kicked from the 35 yard line. The receiving team has the player who is designed to catch and run with the ball usually around its own goal line. That means that players from the kickoff team can run 70 yards at full speed before hitting a player on the opposing team. The kickoff is the only type of play where players run such a distance before hitting each other, making it the most dangerous play in the game.
“I don’t think there is any doubt it is the most dangerous play in the game,” said Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby in a CBS interview. This is the reason that competition committees all over the country are looking for a way to tweak the game in order to protect players and make football safer. In the same article, Todd Berry, the director of an advisory group stated, “I’m excited we’re starting to have this discussion. It looks like the data is skewed where we have more injuries on that play. If that’s the case, we have to look at eliminating the play, modifying the play, change blocking schemes.”
Kickoffs are not a new danger to players. The 2010 Rutgers linebacker, Eric LeGrand, was paralyzed from the neck down after suffering a spinal cord injury while making a tackle on a kickoff. Additionally, in 2015, Southern University’s, Devon Gales, was paralyzed while attempting to throw a block as a member of the receiving team during a kickoff return.
That leaves one final question, if the kickoff was to be done away with, what would take its place instead? To this question I see two possible solutions, first of which is to simply give the team who would have been the receiving team the ball at their own 20 or 25 yard line, simply like a touchback is now. The other and more interesting solution would be to give the team who would be kicking off the ball at their own 35 yard line where they would have kicked off from, and the situation would be a fourth down and ten yards to go for a first down. While this may seem like a gimmick, it would allow teams the opportunity to punt and conduct a safer version of the kickoff or the opportunity to try to go for it and pick up the ten yards, which would now take the place of an onside kick. I believe this second option would be the most fair and exciting way to proceed and I believe it would be a good replacement for the kickoff.
