The kickers strike back
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sixty-yard field goals! Landing zones! The K ball! The kicking game seemingly has never played a bigger role in the NFL than it is this season. The Athletic national NFL writers Jourdan Rodrigue and Mike Sando join Robert Mays to dive into The Year of the Kicker in the NFL, how we got to this point, and the effects the rule changes are having on the league on this episode of The Athletic Football Show.
Rundown (timestamps are approximate)
4:30 The evolution in kickoff rules
29:36 The K ball
38:53 How much does this all matter?
48:27 The effects on offenses and defenses
Host: Robert Mays
With: Jourdan Rodrigue and Mike Sando
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Video Producer: Katy Duffy
Audio Producer: Michael Beller
Social Producer: Scott Krinch
Follow Robert on Bluesky: @robertmays.bsky.social
Follow Jourdan on Bluesky: @jourdanrodrigue.bsky.social
Follow Mike on Bluesky: @sandonfl.bsky.social
Follow Robert on X: @robertmays
Follow Jourdan on X: @JourdanRodrigue
Follow Mike on X: @SandoNFL
Theme song: Haunted
Written by Dylan Slocum, Trevor Dietrich, Ruben Duarte, Kyle McAulay, and Meredith VanWoert / Performed by Spanish Love Songs
Courtesy of Pure Noise / By arrangement with Bank Robber Music, LLC
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. |
| 0:05.0 | I'm Robert Mays. |
| 0:06.0 | You guys might have picked up over the last few years that special teams is not my favorite |
| 0:10.4 | part of football. |
| 0:11.0 | You've got to twist my arm to talk about kicking and the like on this show. |
| 0:15.0 | And I understand that's a personal blind spot. |
| 0:16.9 | I don't think that's a good thing. |
| 0:18.5 | This year, the NFL has just shoved me toward having to care |
| 0:23.4 | about it. We have reached the pinnacle of how important kicking is in the NFL coming from a |
| 0:28.8 | couple different directions. The new kickoff rule, changing the touchback to the 30 to the 35, |
| 0:33.9 | has more than doubled the return rate from the 2024 season. It has made the dynamic kickoff rule truly dynamic, and it has made kickoffs a live play |
| 0:42.2 | in the NFL again, and it has changed strategy, how teams have to approach it. |
| 0:46.6 | It's a fun thing. |
| 0:47.7 | And so we wanted to dig into that, but also talk about the change in the K-ball rule coming |
| 0:52.6 | into this season, which if you haven't heard about this, the NFL allowed kickers this year to start working up the kicking |
| 0:59.4 | balls throughout the entire week, the same way you could for a quarterback or any other |
| 1:03.4 | position when it used to be a scenario where you had about a half hour before the game to work |
| 1:07.2 | those balls up. And there are some people, coaches around the NFL, Vic Fangio, |
| 1:16.0 | included, who's been talking about how this is materially changed what kickers are capable of. |
| 1:20.3 | And this rule has quietly been very impactful. And so from two different directions, |
| 1:25.7 | we have kicking being more important than the NFL than it's ever been. We have kickoffs now, |
| 1:28.5 | dictating how games are going to go. If you miss the landing zone late in the game, you're giving the team the ball at the 40 yard line. And on the other side of it, |
... |
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