Patriots Special Teams Report: Week 1 at Arizona Cardinals

The NFL’s continuing its attempt to make kickoffs safer by moving the spot of the ball following a touchback to the 25 yard line is supposed to give teams further incentive to not make any attempt to return kicks and simply take a knee in the end zone. Unfortunately for the league, at least in the case of the New England Patriots, that rule might backfire.

While the sample size is admittedly very small, it seems as though the Patriots would far prefer Stephen Gostkowski to loft a high kick that ends up between the five yard line and the goal line, luring their opponents into returning kicks, instead of driving the ball through the back of the endzone and giving the opposing offense the ball at the 25 yard line. Of Gostkowski’s six kicks in Sunday’s game, four were placed between the five yard line and a yard into the end zone, resulting in returns off four of his six kicks (the opening kickoff and Gostkowski’s first kick of the second half were touchbacks). Arizona never made it past their own 21 on those returns, and had an average starting field position off kickoffs of the 18 yard line, the worst starting field position off kickoffs in the entire NFL this week, according to ESPN Stats and Information.

A difference of seven or so yards might seem trivial, but it’s interesting to consider the effect that starting a drive off on the 25 has versus a drive starting at the 20. numberFire uses its Net Expected Points (NEP) analytic to help illustrate the importance of the five yard difference. When a drive starts at the 20, that play has an expected points value of about 0.40, meaning that team is expected to score that much on that particular drive (for more information about NEP, numberFire offers a more in depth explanation here). When a drive is started at the 25, the expected points value rises to 0.66, which results in a 60.6% increase in expected points value.

Now you can see the significance of the touchback being moved up to 25. That 0.26 increase in expected points from the 20 to the 25 adds up over the course of season; that expected point increase results in an addition 344.24 points over the course of a season, and a per-team average of 10.76. To further reinforce the importance of the new touchback rule, consider this: the Giants lost six games last season by a combined 15 points, meaning those 10.76 points could have been the difference between winning their division and hosting a playoff game to playing meaningless games down the stretch and hitting the links in January.

Point is, the new touchback rule has shifted the focus on kickoffs greatly, and the Patriots, who led the NFL last season in touchbacks with 69, seem to have adapted their strategy perfectly. As I stated earlier, one game is not enough to tell if this will become a trend for Gostkowski and the Pats, but if I had to guess, I would say that we will see a lot more lofted kicks inside the five, enticing teams to try their luck and return it.