It’s not just players and coaching staff that need to adjust to the NFL’s new kickoff rule.
The so-called ‘Dynamic Kickoff’ was debuted in Thursday night’s Hall of Fame Game between the Chicago Bears and Houston Texans, as the NFL looked to breathe life into a play that had become increasingly moribund over recent seasons.
Each of the league’s 32 teams will have been hard at work plotting how to take advantage of the new rules this offseason, but Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin has taken an innovative approach to tackling the new rules, as he worked with EA Sports, the makers of the Madden NFL 25 video game, who are also getting to grips with the new set-up.
Tomlin has revealed how he asked the makers of Madden what they planned to do regarding the new rules when he was having his face digitally scanned for inclusion in the latest version of the best-selling franchise.
This quickly led to him working alongside the Madden team, as he watched the game being played on Zoom calls and would request changes to the play as he looked to learn as much about the new rules as he could.
"We're going into uncharted territory with this kickoff concept," Tomlin said in a statement from EA Sports, via the NFL. "There's actually no real visuals of the concept. My sons play all the EA Sports games. I have a lot of respect for the realism of their product. We reached out to those guys and wanted to just kind of get a visual, maybe, of some of the schematics -- how the alignment might affect the timing of blocks and so forth.
"That game is more than entertainment from my perspective -- it is a real simulator. As we all move into uncharted territory in terms of not knowing what these concepts look like, I viewed it as a potential tool to aid us in teaching and gaining some understanding and experience where there is none, while at the same time maybe helping them do what it is that they needed to do, because really they had the same issues that we did."
While we didn’t see any fireworks in the Hall of Fame Game between the Chicago Bears and Houston Texans on Thursday night, the new kickoff rule is likely to be one of the more interesting early-season subplots this year.
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