In a spacious auditorium on Georgia Tech’s campus back in February of 2019, Alex Wainger, a data engineer from Facebook, pitched a panel of NFL experts on a good idea: Eliminate the rule on punts where the kicking team has to remain on the line of scrimmage until after the kick.
He looked through the previous three years of GPS data on every punt in the NFL and correlated that information with injury data over a similar period of time. The elementary version of his conclusion is that this rule was added at a time when the league was somewhat desperate for attention and wanted to microwave scoring on punt returns.