That sounds good to me. Making a 4th and 15 is about the same difficulty as getting the onside kick. Either case is an act of desperation.
Leave it the way it is. Kick offs with possible rare onside kicks, pooch kicks, squib kicks, trying to kick it away from the speedy return man, etc. Also the rare return for TD for the win.
Take away the kick offs, next will be the punts taken away and give some automatic spot depending on where the punt initiated.
My biggest fear is football some day ends up as flag football. Some big time lawyer outfit gets a huge injury settlement and contact football ends.
If football is going to survive long term (and I think it will) it is going to have to eliminate some of the riskiest plays. It has done that somewhat already, and it will continue to do so.
I don’t think there is a more dangerous play in football right now than the onside kick. I watched a high school kid get taken off on a stretcher because of a hit he took on one three weeks ago. His eyes were up looking for the ball on a high bounce and a player from the kickoff team hit him hard. He never saw the hit coming.
Football without kickoffs, or no football at all? Not a difficult choice to me. Put it on the 25 and let’s go.
In the early 60’s my Junior High team (PB Dollarway) was playing BeeBe at their stadium. I was on the kickoff team and my teammate took a hit to the head right beside me. He got on his hands and knees and began crawling backwards with a far away look in his eyes. We got him to lay down and he didn’t know who or where he was. They took him to the hospital where he stayed overnight. He had a concussion and even then was out for several weeks. That one play is burnt in my memory still. Tony was fine and is still doing today but we all remember how scary head injuries can be.
I’d kinda hate to see that. Onsides kicks are rare, but they’re part of the game. Besides, I think the kicking game ought to be part of football. I understand the safety issue & because of that, I wouldn’t object too much. It seems they’d done a pretty good job now of reducing returns–making a fair catch and a touchback on KO’s come out to the 25. Fewer returns than there used to be.
Personally, I’d rather go back to 10 or 11 game seasons to reduce injury, but I know that’s not happening.
I don’t really understand the onside kicks everyone tries to use now. the teams that do the melon ball kick where the kicker barely rolls the ball 10 yards and the rest of the team just tries to block the other team away from it seems much more successful.
The best I’ve ever seen, in high school we had a soccer kid that could kick the ball and make it stay almost up on one end and spin like a top. It would go 10 yards and then spin back towards the kicking team. It worked several times, and I’ve never seen anyone else do it.
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