The National Football League is run by a cabal of tinkerers. Every offseason, the tinkerers assemble together and brainstorm ways to make modifications to the game that take us incrementally further way from what we are familiar with. It’s rare that these changes make many people happy.
The latest to get people up in arms is a one-year experiment that will allow return teams to call for a fair catch anywhere on the field on a kickoff and have the line of scrimmage set to the 25-yard line as though it were a touchback.
While the purpose of the change is to try to make the play safer, with the league citing some dubious data about kickoffs being more dangerous and more susceptible to producing concussions, many feel the unintended consequences will be more harmful—particularly to those players who make their money as return specialists, like Gunner Olszewski, who shared his opinion with Chris Adamski of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.