The NFL has revolutionized the kickoff, turning it in the blink of an eye from a dead play into something that will be very much undead. And the consequences of the new approach, which has 19 or 20 players clustered together and not moving until the ball is caught or strikes the ground in the landing zone, remain largely unknown.
On Wednesday, 49ers special teams coordinator Brian Schneider spoke at length about the new rule and the vast changes it will be bringing to the game.
“In the offseason when you get the news it’s a lot of anxiety because what you’re looking at is, the only thing you really have to look at is the XFL and it’s different too, than that,” Schneider told reporters. “So you really try to do as much as you can until the players got here. Because before it was all in my brain and one thing would go to another and then all of a sudden, I think it’s about here now for me, in terms of once we get the fundamentals together, once we ask the players to communicate with us, talk to us, what do you see? And once we kind of broke it down that way to get to, I think some fundamentals that will stick in terms of how to get there, and now we have to see where it goes. Because it’s different. That’s for sure.”
He said he watched “a ton” of XFL tape, even though there are differences between the XFL approach (which wasn’t adopted by the UFL) and the NFL’s configuration. One big similarity is that, once the ball is kicked, most of the players will not be moving at all.
“I think everyone that sees it for the first time, it’s really strange because you see the kickoff and I’m standing right here and it’s just like, it’s like you’re in space,” Schneider said. “You never see that happen without everyone moving. And so, it’s really like the music went off and everything, I was like in the Twilight Zone and then when it happens it’s just, it’s really fast. So getting used to all that for the players and it is going to continue to evolve.”
Schneider sees it…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/49ers-teams-processing-massive-change-001826224.html
Author : ProFootball Talk on NBC Sports
Publish date : 2024-05-30 00:18:26
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