The news jolted Dave Toub. Sitting at breakfast in March with Troy Vincent, the NFL's executive vice president of football operations, Toub heard the words he had feared for years.
"Troy said, 'You know, the kickoff is going to disappear,'" said Toub, the Kansas City Chiefs' special-teams coordinator. "He just stated it like that."
As they ate, Vincent told Toub about a competition-committee meeting a few days earlier. A data-driven video presentation from the NFL's medical staff had painted a bleak picture of the kickoff. Results of the inherent high-speed collisions were so jarring -- the kickoff is five times as likely to cause a concussion as other plays, members were told -- that Vincent ordered the video be stopped early.