Stewart Mandel's mailbag comments on this:
What are your thoughts on Nicole Auerbach’s piece about changing the kickoff rule? Does this proposed rule change (a team that fair-catches the kickoff inside the 25 gets a touchback) help or hurt both safety and the on-field game?
John B.
I don’t think there’s any question it helps with safety, but it’s also just kind of awkward. It’s like the rules-makers are saying, “We know having the two sides come racing at each other full speed from opposite ends of the field has always been a recipe for disaster, but the public will mutiny if we get rid of it altogether, so here’s a weird compromise.” If you think kickoff returns are so dangerous that you’re manipulating the rules to try to avoid them, then you might as well go ahead and eliminate them.
Which would be fine with me.
There are some traditions in sports I hold sacred and believe should never be touched — like, say, the announcement of the NCAA tournament bracket — but kickoffs are not one of them. If you just let the other team take over at the 25 after a score, like we do in overtime, it would reduce the number of injuries far more than it would reduce our enjoyment of football. Eventually you’d barely remember them.
But I guess this fair-catch rule is an OK compromise for now. In the meantime, I will continue to advocate for a far more urgent matter: ridding the sport of those embarrassingly archaic first-down markers. We need GPS chips in the football, and we need them now.