Did NFL owners overreact?

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No, this isn't another cutesy story about ongoing labor discussions between millionaires and their slightly more fortunate billionaire bosses. At the NFL's annual owners' meeting, team owners voted by a 26 to 6 margin to move kickoffs from the 30 to the 35-yard line and to only allow the coverage team to line up a maximum of 5 yards behind the kick. The reasoning? The 5-yard bump should increase touchbacks and reduce the speed with which the coverage team gets to the ball carrier, respectively.

The overall goal, it seems, is to reduce player injury. Let it never be stated that this is something we at O-D would ever blindly argue against. Player health and safety remains our top priority at every level of the game. In fact, the attention we give to preventing injury is a big part of why we've been able to run contact camps for over four decades. The fact is, as the rules stood, kickers were already able to kick the ball out of the endzone on kickoffs and last season more than one kick out of every seven wound up being brought back out to the 20 without the need for contact of any sort.

The owners insist this rule change will help cut back on the amount of injuries in the game and yes, it's hard to argue with that logic. However, a deeper look at the numbers supplied by the NFL reveals that an injury was only 2 percent more likely to occur on a kick return than during any other play (7% vs. 5%), a number that strains the bounds of statistical significance.

No one wants to see a player get hurt. In a perfect world, every football player would use picture-perfect technique, the best equipment science could design, and every possible extra safety measure we can think of aside from just telling every one to go home and athletes would probably still get injured playing the game we love. When we transform that game into something else entirely, have we gone too far?