Just before the New York Jets’ season began, Antonio Cromartie, the veteran cornerback who had rejoined the team in March, proposed an interesting personnel move to head coach Todd Bowles.
Besides covering the receivers not assigned to Darrelle Revis, Cromartie told Bowles he was volunteering to return kickoffs. Cromartie had returned 54 kickoffs in 10 previous NFL seasons, most notably a 47-yarder that led to a Jets’ playoff victory over Indianapolis in 2010.
“I want to help the team as much as possible – to give us better field position,” Cromartie told the Guardian. “That’s the excitement of it. I’ve been doing it since Pop Warner football. I always have fun with it.”
Cromartie said Bowles told him to wait a couple of weeks. Kickoff return duty these days is usually assigned to a backup receiver or defensive back – not a starter – and, after a rules change following the 2010 season, kickoffs are seldom returned, anyway.
Kickoff returners are becoming as obsolete as farriers, coopers or paper boys: through the first 12 weeks of the 2015 NFL season, 1,051 of 1,826 kickoffs, or 57.6%, resulted in touchbacks. A year ago, 50.3%, were unreturned.
In 2010, before kickoffs were moved from the 30-yard line up to the 35-yard line, only 416 of 2,539 kickoffs, or 16.4%, resulted in touchbacks. In 2003, a mere 7.9% of kickoffs were not returned.
Through Monday, only six kickoffs had been returned for touchdowns this year – four of them 100 or more yards. Detroit’s Ameer Abdullah, a rookie running back from Nebraska who is getting more carries lately, returned a kick 104 yards on 15 November against the Green Bay Packers, but was stopped at the Packers’ one-yard line. It tied an NFL record for longest non-scoring play.
Besides being highly exciting, though, kickoff returns are highly dangerous, with open-field collisions between players running at full speed. The NFL made the decision to move up the kickoff line, in large part, to prevent even more injuries.
Now a kicker’s strategy is relatively simple: “I kick it as high and as far as I can,” Josh Brown, the Giants’ kicker, told the Guardian.
“What you’ve done, is to almost make a kickoff return a daring act,” Brown said.
So much so, Brown said, that he said he gets “miffed” when a kick is returned. “When you think about lives, or people’s health, that you can protect, and it’s a pretty big deal,” he said.
In Cromartie’s case, Bowles eventually gave in, and the veteran brought back seven kickoffs for 195 yards in two games – not a bad rate of return.
But then came Sunday’s 38-20 victory over the Miami Dolphins, in which the Dolphins kicked off four times, and none were returned by Cromartie. One was returned by a team-mate, another was an onside kick, and a third went out of bounds.
Cromartie only got to actually field one kick – the opening kickoff – and Miami kicker Andrew Franks booted it so deep into the end zone that Cromartie decided not to bring it out. “What’s too deep of a kickoff? I’m not returning anything over five yards deep,” Cromartie said.
New York Giants wide receiver Dwayne Harris, who also returns kicks, told the Guardian: “Some people are different than others. For me, I don’t bring it out if it goes six yards. Later in the season, the weather changes, and the ball doesn’t go as far.”
Miami Dolphins wide receiver Jarvis Landry, who sometimes returns kicks, said last week: “Coach kind of gives me free rein on it, you know? If I can catch the ball coming forward, or with a lean catching the ball towards the designated spot, then I’ll take it out. It doesn’t matter how deep it is. It can be nine yards deep, but if I can catch the ball on the run going forward with some momentum I’ll pretty much take any ball out.”
NFL teams don’t invest as much on kickoff returns as they used to. In 2009, the Jets used a fourth-round draft choice on Florida State running back Leon Washington, who had 151 carries in his rookie season but no more than 76 in any of eight seasons after that.
Washington extended his career by returning kicks – and he did so very well, running back an NFL-record eight of them for touchdowns. But when Washington’s one-year deal with Tennessee ran out at the end of last season, his career was also apparently over.
Josh Cribbs, who holds the NFL record alongside Washington, was an undrafted free agent who crafted a fine 10-year career as a returner with Cleveland, the Jets and Indianapolis. But when the Colts released him after last season, Cribbs was unable to land another job. He told ESPN this summer that three teams were interested. But none signed him. Both Washington and Cribbs are now in their early 30s but a career as a dedicated returner appears to be getting tougher to sustain.
Among returners, Dwayne Harris’s story is common these days. Harris had only seven receptions for the Dallas Cowboys in 2014, but he signed a five-year, $17.5m contract with the Giants because he could also return kicks.
Through 11 games this season, Harris has 27 receptions for a Giants’ receiving corps hit hard by injuries – but only 16 kickoff returns. He had one kickoff return for 19 yards in a 20-14 loss Sunday to Washington, but Washington’s other four kickoffs resulted in touchbacks.
“Most of the time, you want to catch it going forward,” Harris said.
That is pretty hard to do on kickoffs that sail over his head. Mike Westhoff, the Jets’ longtime special-teams coach, used to give his returners only one guideline: no matter how deep the kick, they had to be moving forward when they caught the ball.
But that is not happening very often. After Jets kicker Nick Folk suffered a season-ending quadriceps injury last month, the team signed Randy Bullock, a four-year veteran from Texas A&M. Only five of Bullock’s 15 kickoffs have been returned – four on Sunday.
“I think it really helps your team with field position,” Bullock told the Guardian. “You don’t give some of their best players a chance to touch the ball, and you give the other guys on your team a rest, too. It’s just one of those things.”
