Value of NFL Kickoffs

By Kurt Bullard

As we await the opening kickoff of the NFL season that may or may not feature one of the winningest quarterbacks in league history, it’s perhaps a good time to look at the actual act of the kickoff itself.

When either Stephen Gostkowski or Josh Scobee opens the season off with a booming kick downfield, it will mark the fifth year that kickoff sequence will begin at the kicking team’s own 35 rather than its 30. While the kickoff is still exciting and offers a team a chance to change the game in a matter of seconds, it’s interesting to look at how the impact of the kickoff has changed over the past five years.

On the very surface of the issue, the kickoff is no longer as exciting as it used to be. In the entirety of the 2014, only six kicks were returned for touchdowns. In 2010, an astonishing 23 kicks were brought to the house. That’s a difference of 102 points scored over the course of the season, not even including the subsequent extra points.

It seems that, even if you’re an excellent kickoff returner, the lack of space on kickoffs makes it difficult to break one. So, what even is the worth of a good kickoff returner and kickoff defensive team anymore? How many points can you expect a good returner to account for over a season?

To look at this, I examined all kicks from the 2014 season using data from nflsavant.com. To filter for kicks that were plausibly returnable, I filtered out all kicks that were described as onsides kicks or kicks that were fielded over the 20-yard-line for fear that they were squib kicks or not fully representative of a normal, returnable kick. I also took out the ten kicks last year that sailed out of bounds and kicks that did not start at the 35 due to penalty. That left me with kicks that were either returned or downed for a touchback.

I then ranked each kick by how much expected points it got the team according to Brian Burke’s win probability calculator. This is not all that needs to be done, however, because all kicks are not equally returnable. A kick received at the back of the end zone is not as easy to get to the 20 as a kick that is actually caught at the 20.

In this analysis, I unfortunately had to filter out the touchbacks because NFL Savant didn’t report where touchbacks were caught. So, I only looked at kicks that were returned. This would favor teams that were more conservative fielding kicks because of selection bias.

Here is the expected point value table of kick returns by starting yard line.

With this, you could then find the value added by kick returners by finding the residual expected point value for each kick return, which I did for each team for every qualifying kick during the year. I then summed those up and ranked them by expected points per return over the course of the year.

Kansas City got the biggest boost from its return unit, putting its offense in a better position than anyone else by essentially giving the offense .3 points each drive to work with. The Raiders, on the other hand, were hindering an already weak offense with the worst kickoff return unit in the league.

Returning is only one half of the game, however. You also have to defend these teams. Using the same methodology, I saw which good teams were at stopping returners in their tracks. I then summed up these residuals and added them to the sum of the residuals for each team’s returns to see the overall impact of kickoffs over the course of the season.

The teams that overwhelmingly stand out are, again, the Chiefs and the Raiders. Even though the Chiefs were below average at defending kicks, their return game was so strong that they were still overall the best unit in the league last year. Still, having the best kickoff unit only netted the Chiefs 10.59 points over the course of an entire season. Kansas City and Cincinnati were the only two teams that squeezed out more than a touchdown’s worth of field position advantage over the course of a season. The Raiders were the only team to lose more than a touchdown, in fact losing more than two touchdowns worth of field position over the course of the season.

The overwhelming story, however, is that with the lack of explosiveness on kickoffs due to the rule change, kickoffs really don’t mean that much anymore. Occasionally, someone will break one, but shortening the distance the defending team has to cover and the increasing number of touchbacks has really leveled the playing field – most teams hover around a net zero of expected points gained. So while a special teams play could end up being the decisive factor in a single game, kickoffs by no means win seasons.