Prepare for Rams Wild and Whacky NFL Rule Changes on Kickoffs

The LA Rams may not have had one of the best special teams units in the NFL in 2023, but that could change drastically for the 2024 NFL season. Not only did the team draft one of the best kickers of the last 10 years, Stanford kicker Joshua Karty, but the NFL changed everything about kickoffs. Well, not JUST kickoff, as each new NFL season comes with a new set of regulations and rules, as NFL insider Ian Rapoport generously shared, there are weeks. :

There are 12 new rule changes to digest in this information update, and as is usually the case, there are plenty of new rules regarding reviewable games, as well as drama and controversy on the news rules.

The new rule we want to focus on is Rule 10A, a rule which states:

“Rule 10A: By the Competition Committee, for one year only, amends Rule 6 to create a new form of free kick play which is designed to: (1) resemble a typical scrum game by aligning players from both teams closer together and restricting movement to reduce space and speed, and (2) promote more returns Allows the replay official to automatically check if a free kick legally touched the ground. or a player from the receiving team in the landing zone.

– In accordance with NFL rules and statutes

Okay, that’s a lot of information to parse up front, but there’s not enough detail to give us a real menu of what it entails. To get a more complete picture of how this new kickoff rule will play out, I now turn to the website operations.NFL.com himself. The details included in the description of the new rule are quite voluminous and may be better suited to curing insomnia than informing fans. So I took it a step further by distilling all the rules into bite-sized chunks of what has and will change as part of this new, one-year-only experiment.