The Kickoff Comes Back

On October 11, 2026, Eagles kicker Jake Elliott opened the game in London with a 55-yard kick to the Jacksonville 10-yard line. Jaguars rookie Josh Cameron caught it and ran 90 yards for a touchdown.¹ It would have been the first kickoff return touchdown of the NFL season. It never counted. Flags on both teams wiped it out, a fight at midfield got two players ejected, and the teams kicked off again.²³

In the final seconds, a kickoff decided the game. With the Eagles ahead 17-16 and 8 seconds left, Jacksonville's Ameer Abdullah returned the kick 53 yards. Cam Little then made a 57-yard field goal to win 19-17.⁴ Three seasons earlier, kicks like that one usually landed in the end zone and stayed there. In 2023, teams returned only 21.8 percent of kickoffs.⁵

How the kickoff nearly disappeared

The league spent years reshaping the kickoff to reduce injuries. In 2010, teams returned 80 percent of kickoffs. In 2011 the league moved the kickoff up to the 35-yard line, kickers began booming the ball through the end zone, and the return rate fell to 53.4 percent. It kept falling until it hit that record low in 2023.⁵

A touchback, a kick that goes into the end zone and is not returned, gives the receiving team the ball at a fixed spot. When touchbacks became the norm, the kickoff turned into a formality.

A new play

In 2024 the clubs rebuilt the kickoff from scratch to address the lowest return rate in league history and the injury rate on the play. They called it the dynamic kickoff.⁶

The kicker still kicks from his own 35. The other ten players on the kicking team line up at the receiving team's 40-yard line, and at least nine players on the return team line up in a setup zone between the 35 and the 30. Nobody on either side may move until the ball hits the ground or a returner inside the landing zone, the area between the goal line and the 20-yard line.⁶ A kick that falls short of the landing zone gives the return team the ball at its own 40.⁷

The first season brought fewer dangerous collisions but only a modest gain in returns. The rate rose to 32.8 percent.⁵ Kickers still found it safer to send the ball into the end zone.

Five yards that changed the math

For 2025 the league made one more change: a touchback now gives the receiving team the ball at the 35-yard line instead of the 30.⁸ Kicking the ball away suddenly cost real field position, so coaches told their kickers to keep it in play.

The effect was immediate. Teams returned 75.6 percent of kickoffs in Week 1, the highest rate for any week since 2010.⁵ Through the first two weeks, touchbacks fell from 67.7 percent of kickoffs a year earlier to 16.7 percent.⁸ "I'm just happy that the foot is still in the game," said Troy Vincent, the league's executive vice president of football operations.⁹

By the end of the 2025 regular season, teams had returned 74.5 percent of kickoffs, 1,157 more returns than the year before.¹⁰ More returns also meant more contact. Concussions on kickoffs rose from 8 to 35, though the rate per play stayed below the old format.¹¹

Still waiting on the big one

The returns came back. The long touchdown runs did not, at least not yet. Through the first four weeks of the 2026 season, no one returned a kickoff for a touchdown. The longest return was a 79-yard run by Miami's Jaylen Wright, whom Las Vegas pushed out of bounds at its own 18-yard line. The league recorded six kickoff return touchdowns in 2025, seven in 2024 and four in 2023.¹²

That is why the London kickoff stood out. Cameron returned the kick 90 yards to the end zone, the exact play the new rules aimed to bring back, and penalty flags took it away. The kickoff itself is back in football. The touchdown that goes with it is the last piece still missing.