It seems that Tommy Townsend isn’t the only member of the Kansas City Chiefs’ organization to have some concerns about the NFL’s new fair catch rule on kickoffs.
Chiefs HC Andy Reid was asked about the rule change during his media availability on Wednesday. He doesn’t quite know what to expect from it, but he’s not too keen on modifying the game in that way. He feels it could be a slippery slope that eventually leads to the NFL becoming an entirely different game.
“I don’t know, we’ll have to go through all that,” Reid said of the rule change. “My thing is, where does it stop? I mean, you start taking pieces and you know, we’ll see how this goes but you don’t want to take too many pieces away or you’re going to be playing flag football.”
The most awkward part about all of this is that the Chiefs were one of the 26 teams to vote to approve the one-year trial run of this new rule. So, there seems to be some friction between ownership, coaches and players as it relates to this particular change.
Ownership is clearly looking out for the NFL seeing this as an opportunity to potentially lower concussion and injury rates. Meanwhile, players and coaches are more concerned about the integrity of the game they know and love. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, but right now there doesn’t appear to be much of an agreeable middle ground.
If this rule is adopted beyond the one-year trial run in 2023, it could cause some more strife at the expense of the special teams phase.
