Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images
In 2011, after the N.F.L. moved the kickoff line up
by 5 yards, there were more touchbacks and fewer concussions on
kickoffs.
Tasker was one of the greatest special-teams players in league history
as a kickoff returner, and, more notably, on kick coverage. He loved
covering kicks, which he calls “a train wreck of a play,” loved it so
much that he used to say the world would be a better place if everyone
got to cover a kickoff once a week. He compares it to charging up a hill
to take it in battle, to running headlong as a child. The wild,
reckless abandon of the play speaks to men in their early 20s, Tasker
says, striking a deep emotional chord that resonates with him still.
And he would prefer that nobody ever has to do it again.
Tasker, still a Buffalo legend for how he covered kickoffs, is one of
the most unlikely proponents of eliminating kickoffs and their peril
from the N.F.L., and almost certainly the most insightful. The time and
distance from his playing days, and his job as an analyst for CBS
Sports, have allowed him to take the long view of the job he performed
better than almost anyone else.
“The thing they’ll miss is the tradition of it,” Tasker said. “You say
‘We’ll kick things off.’ It’s an expression in our vocabulary. The coin
flip — what happens to that? There are little small ripples that will
change things.
“By the same token, we’ll have in 15 years an entirely new generation of
football fans that won’t remember what it’s like. Kickoffs will
probably go away, and I don’t think too many people will miss it.”
He added: “I regret that some guys won’t be able to experience it. But
now that I’m removed from it, I understand, too, you can live without.
It’s just not worth it. As fun as it was, as liberating and invigorating
as it was, life is long and hard, but you don’t need to shorten it.”
That is the crux of the balancing act N.F.L. officials grapple with in
the name of player safety. Football has never been as tradition-bound as
baseball, but when team owners and Commissioner Roger Goodell have
mentioned publicly in the last year the idea of radically altering the
kickoff — especially adopting an idea formulated by Tampa Bay Coach Greg
Schiano that would replace the kickoff with a fourth-and-15 situation
from a team’s own 30, allowing the team to choose to run an offensive
play or punt — the debate became a microcosm of the broader questions
confronting a league in transition: when is the way the game is played
altered so drastically that it is no longer the same game?
“That is a consideration,” said John Mara, the president of the Giants
and the chairman of the league’s competition committee. “If at the end
of day we believe by making a drastic change we could significantly
reduce the number of injuries, that’s something that would outweigh
tradition.”
For now, that choice does not seem imminent. The N.F.L. usually moves
deliberately when making rules changes, and Mara says he believes the
league is far from having the required 24 of 32 owner votes necessary to
eliminate the kickoff, although he does think it is inevitable there
will be more modest changes. Once the season ends, Mara and the rest of
the committee will watch tape of just about every serious injury that
occurred on a kickoff return this season. The committee members will
look for what caused the injury — a head-on collision versus a block,
for instance — and where the hits came from.
They will also review this season’s injury data. The N.F.L. has long
said that kickoffs have the highest rate of injury of any play. When the
N.F.L. moved the kickoff line from the 30 to the 35 before the 2011
season, the percentage of touchbacks leapt from 16.4 percent to 43.5
percent, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. And, as intended, the
injury rate fell accordingly. According to N.F.L. figures, there were 40
percent fewer concussions
on kickoffs in 2011 than there had been in 2010. With the percentage of
kickoffs resulting in touchbacks increasing this season — it stands at
45.2 percent through Week 14 — the league will hope that injuries have
dropped again.
Then, Mara said, he would want to seek opinions from coaches and others
around the league on what incremental modifications could be made to
make kickoffs safer, without eliminating them. He will get an earful.
The Jets special-teams coach Mike Westhoff has already spoken to some
league officials about his idea: make the receiving team put eight men
up — there are now only five or six — and only three back to receive the
kick. That would force blockers to engage much earlier, eliminating the
running starts that build speed and slowing down the collisions.
Blockers would instead run down the field side by side with those
covering the kick, as happens on punts.
