NFL kickoffs are genuinely exciting now!

New kickoff rules have opened up new frontiers of coaching genius and stupidity. PLUS more cycling feats that make you want to die, and watching NBA stars put their countries on their backs.

Sep 11, 2025

I swear Week 1 of the NFL season hit and the temperature instantly dropped 10 degrees. I thought about soup for the first time in months. The leaves on some of the trees outside my window are suddenly football-colored. My various Homefield Apparel hoodies and crewnecks teleported from the bottom of my drawer onto my upper body.

This phenomenon does not take place in the South, where it remains uncomfortably hot and humid. This is probably why college football is not particularly popular there.

What I love about the new kickoff

Football coaches do not like new. They like routine. They want every week to be the same for the rest of their lives. They want every player to do the same thing in every practice. They want the rules to stay the same forever, unless a rule happens to screw their team, in which case they would like it to be changed immediately.

But over the past two seasons, the NFL has drastically changed the kickoff. A little over 10 years ago, I wrote that the NFL should simply ban kickoffs, arguing that the play was simultaneously dangerous and boring. (Except for the one in The Dark Knight Rises. That was dangerous and exciting.)

I’ve gotta hand it to the NFL (and the XFL/UFL, which pioneered the new kickoff form before it got to the NFL.) The league managed to create a version of the play that leads to more big plays and seems likely to result in fewer life-altering injuries. (Donald Trump notably hates the new kickoff, because he lacks critical thinking skills and generally likes to complain when stuff is different than it was in the 1980s.)

The new kickoff went into effect last year, but it made only a modest impact because teams kept kicking the ball into the end zone to prevent returns. This year the NFL moved touchbacks to the 35-yard line, disincentivizing this strategy. The change is working: NFL teams are so far returning 75 percent of kickoffs, up from 32 percent last year.

We’re seeing new kick return strategies as a result, both good and bad.

The early geniuses appear to be the Patriots, who produced three of the five longest returns in preseason (including the only touchdown.) I loved this video about the scheme they created. They essentially tricked one member of the cover unit to take himself out of the play, and used the extra blocker to create a double-team at the spot were the return man was aiming.

The early doofuses are the Carolina Panthers, whose longest return through the preseason and Week 1 is 28 yards, just slightly longer than the leaguewide Week 1 average of 26.1 yards. Dan Pizzuta (who just started his own football newsletter) broke down what they’re doing wrong. Essentially, the Panthers are making their blockers face away from the kickoff and intentionally run backwards. The goal is to set up better blocks, but in practice they’re giving up 10 yards of field position, every time.
However, while the Panthers are struggling with kickoff returns… they seem to have the best idea for actually kicking the ball off! At least they’re trying things!
And then, on national TV, we got a brilliant example of one team misunderstanding the new rules. Trailing late and kicking off to Minnesota, Chicago needed the clock stoppage from the two-minute warning — an extra timeout, essentially — to have any hope of a comeback. There was 2:02 remaining as the Bears kicked off, meaning they needed to make sure the Vikings did not return the kick so that no time would run off.
The smart move would have been to kick the ball out of bounds, or to take advantage of the new penalty for kicking the ball short of the landing zone. Either would’ve given Minnesota the ball at the 40. Instead, Chicago kicked it deep, hoping Cairo Santos’ kick would carry 75 yards through the back of the end zone.
I get the sense that the Bears’ coaching staff simply failed to account for the updated rules. Back in the day, there was a 20-yard difference between where teams received the ball on a touchback compared to a kickoff out of bounds. Now the difference is just five yards, which is not even close to worth the risk of a potential return.
Meanwhile, the Vikings clearly understood the situation. Cameras showed head coach Kevin O’Connell communicating mid-play with the return man about whether to bring the ball out.

What’s most exciting to me about the new kickoff is that it’s actually new. Football coaches, even the great ones, typically don’t do a lot of innovating. They take strategies and concepts that have been tried and tested over decades on multiple levels of the sport and adapt them to their teams’ strengths.
The new kickoff is different: There has never been a football play like this, and NFL coaches are figuring out what works and what doesn’t on the fly.

WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS

At the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in Valais, Switzerland, American cyclists Keegan Swenson and Kate Courtney won the men’s and women’s cross country marathon events, neither of which had ever been won by American cyclists.

What is the XC marathon event? Exactly what it sounds like: An event for sick, sick individuals who like having an absolutely horrible time in beautiful places. This year’s championship took place on a roughly 80-mile course over 6-7 hours through the Swiss Alps, where bikers had to climb a total of 15,000 feet on unpaved roads at high altitude. Most of the course was inaccessible by car, so there weren’t a lot of fans or TV cameras — just bike perverts fighting gravity and the limits of the human body all by themselves. Here’s a beautifully shot overview of the course and the race.

The best part of the video is when a fan shows up with a sign in French that reads “WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?”

The most dramatic section of the course was a “hike-a-bike” section too steep to climb via bicycle. That’s right, during a bicycle world championship, there was a lengthy section too difficult for the world’s best bikers to bike. The competitors spent about 20 minutes just pushing their bikes uphill, gaining 800 feet of elevation on foot. Here’s Courtney powering through the end of the hike-a-bike:
kateplusfate
A post shared by @kateplusfate
Swenson recorded an episode of his podcast, The Cooldown, right after his championship. (Pretty funny to me, a guy who records a podcast and then calls it a day, to imagine racing my bike for six hours and then doing a podcast. I wouldn’t be able to talk.) Here’s the section where they talk about the hike-a-bike, with Swenson saying, “It was awful … I haven’t breathed that hard in a bike race, like, ever, to be honest.”
I didn’t 100 percent understand all the technical bike talk on the pod, but the gist was that Swenson tried to race with the lightest bike possible, knowing that he’d have to carry the damn thing uphill for 20 minutes.
In case you thought this race was too easy, Courtney also finished her race with a flat tire. One of the reasons she was able to cross the line and win was because she made the savvy technical decision to ride with a tire insert — essentially a fancy, custom-fit pool noodle that helps keep your wheel rolling in case it loses air. Racing bicycles contains multitudes, even if it always ends in pain. (Thanks to my editor, bike-knower Louis Bien, for helping out here—and every week! Follow him here!)

Get these guys some teammates!

We’re up to the semifinals of EuroBasket. We’re getting Greece vs. Turkey, an extremely fraught matchup between two hoops-crazed countries, and Germany vs. Finland, the latter of which has never finished better than sixth.

EuroBasket rules. (It’s definitely a lot better than the FIBA AmeriCup!) This tournament gets some of the best performances out of the world’s best players, and not just because national pride is more motivating than the money they make in the NBA. They’re also forced to do basically everything themselves because they’re surrounded by very different rosters. In the NBA, every player on every roster is an NBA-level talent. In EuroBasket, the most stacked teams top out at maybe four NBA players. These guys put entire countries on their backs.

Here are the best losing performances by NBA superstars thus far:

Kristaps Porziņģis, the only active NBA player on Latvia’s roster, had 34 points and 19 rebounds in its Round of 16 loss to Lithuania.

Nikola Jokić had 33 points and 8 rebounds in Serbia’s Round of 16 loss to Finland:

And Luka Dončić, the only NBA player on Slovenia’s roster, had 39 points, 10 rebounds, and 7 assists in a quarterfinal loss to Germany:

Each remaining team has at most two NBA players … and Greece’s second NBA player is Giannis’ brother. So we’re going to see more heroic performances all around.

On Deck

Folks, we got a big one: The World Athletics Championships start Friday in Japan. (“Athletics” is “track-and-field” in Non-American.) The entire championships are on Peacock, and most of the finals will be shown in the early morning here in the U.S.
The World Wrestling Championships start this weekend in Croatia. Team USA won two golds in wrestling in Paris and has won two of the last three team championships in men’s freestyle.
There’s more football on!

JJ Stavros Schaffer

Sep 11

Speaking of mountain biking, have you ever watched the youtube videos of races from the biker's perspective? Just watching the video is 40 minutes of pure terror. Can't imagine what riding the course is like.

I especially like this one that starts on snow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmCdPQ2Xqhk

2 replies