Could this be the year the NFL changes its punt rules?
For years, data has shown there's a greater risk of injury for football players on punts than on standard NFL plays. The league failed to come up with a safer alternative for years, but according to ESPN, it's possible the competition committee makes a change to the rules this offseason.
As part of a broader article on the state of injuries in the NFL -- which were up 18 percent in 2022 — was a tidbit on data on injuries on kickoffs and punt returns.
"Injuries on punts and kickoffs continue to be 'disproportionate' to the frequency of plays," ESPN's Kevin Seifert reported. The article went on to note that "The NFL competition committee decided not to act on similar data last season, but it will be a topic of conversation again in 2023."
Last year, data told a similar story.
Per Pro Football Talk, in Feb. 2022 NFL executive vice president Jeff Miller said, "Between the punt and kickoff, there's a disproportionate number of concussions occurring on only a couple of plays."
According to PFT's article on injury data from the 2021 regular season, "30 percent of all torn ACLs are on special teams plays," but as the league acknowledged, "those represent only about 17 percent of all plays."
Per The Washington Post's Mark Maske, Rich McKay -- head of the competition committee -- said last offseason that the league was trying to figure out a way "to make the play safer and maintain its competitiveness."
McKay used the kickoff rule implemented in 2011 as a cautionary tale. That rule moved the ball up five yards to the 35-yard line and made touchbacks more common. The league, McKay said, doesn't want to go forward with any rule that brings about the same result to punts.
The disproportionate number of injuries on punts isn't a new phenomenon. Per ESPN's Seifert, in 2018 the league teased changes to its punt rules when it decided to "crowdsource ideas from the analytics community."
At the time, data showed punts resulted in "twice as many concussions" as offensive snaps.
That offseason, the league made blindside blocks illegal after further analysis revealed 33 percent of all concussions on punts were caused by those types of blocks.
The following offseason, the league amended its definition of a defenseless player to include kick and punt returners with possession of the football who aren't able to protect themselves.
Those changes weren't enough to make punts as safe as the league would like, and it will need to do more if it wants to curb the number of injuries suffered on those plays.
How the league plans on doing that without drastically altering the play's DNA is to be determined.
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