The Arizona Cardinals almost pulled off a miracle comeback on Thursday night against the Seattle Seahawks, but a botched kickoff in the final 30 seconds ended up costing them dearly in a 23-20 loss.
With just 28 seconds left to play in the game, Kyler Murray threw a seven-yard touchdown pass to Emari Demercado to tie things up at 20. On the ensuing kickoff, Arizona’s Chad Ryland committed a blunder that might have cost his team the game: His kick didn’t reach the landing zone.
Under the NFL’s new kickoff rule, the kick must land inside the return team’s 20-yard line or it’s a penalty. From the NFL rulebook, “Any kick that hits short of the landing zone — treated like kickoff out of bounds and ball spotted at [the return team’s] 40 yard line; play would be blown dead as soon as kick lands short of the landing zone.”
Ryland’s errant kickoff missed the landing zone by roughly one foot.
The penalty on the kickoff gave the Seahawks the ball at their own 40-yard line, and from there, they quickly moved 26 yards downfield in just 24 seconds to set up Jason Myers’ game-winning field goal from 52 yards out.
Losing on a botched kickoff is something that should never happen. You can obviously blame Ryland for this bad kick, but the coaching staff might also deserve some blame here.
If the Cardinals called for a normal kickoff into the landing zone and Ryland simply mishit the ball, then it’s 100% on him.
On the other hand, if the coaching staff asked him to hit a low line drive — the kick looked to be a knuckle ball — then the most of the blame should fall on them. In this situation, that’s a high-risk kick. Before the new kickoff rule was implemented, kickers were almost never asked to kick a low knuckleball line drive, so this is something they’ve had to add to their arsenal and they’ve had barely a year to perfect it.
Under the old rule, you would commonly see squib kicks, but those only travel in the air for 10 or 15 yards before hitting the ground and rolling the rest of the way. Under the new kickoff rule, the squib kick as we know it doesn’t really exist anymore because the ball has to travel at least 45 yards in the air to make it to the landing zone.
The Cardinals had four kickoffs in the game before Ryland’s errant kick and here’s where the Seahawks started on each one:
Kickoff 1: Seattle 23-yard line
Kickoff 2: Seattle 34-yard line
Kickoff 3: Seattle 34-yard line
Kickoff 4: Seattle 22-yard line
Based on how the kickoff coverage team had done earlier in the game, it probably would have made a lot more sense for Cardinals coach Jonathan Gannon to have Ryland kick it normally and trust his coverage team rather than attempt a high-risk line drive kick.
After the game, Gannon was asked what his team was trying to accomplish on the final kickoff.
“Keep it in play,” Gannon said. “That’s kind of one of the things we talk about late in the game there with the amount of timeouts and time and what they needed, we were trying to burn off some time there.”
Despite the ugly kickoff, Gannon said he definitely wasn’t blaming Ryland for the loss. The Cardinals kicker had an otherwise impressive night that included two field goals with one of those coming from 57 yards.
“Chad played his ass off,” Gannon said. “The game doesn’t come down to one play. We didn’t do enough collectively for 60 minutes to win the game.”
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This is the second time this season that a coach has made a questionable decision on a late game kickoff. Back in Week 1, the Bears were kicking off to the Vikings with 2:02 left in the game. At the time, the Bears were trailing 27-24. The smart move would have been for the Bears to kick it out of bounds so that no time ran off the clock. This would have allowed them to use the two-minute warning timeout to their advantage. Instead of kicking it out of bounds, the Bears booted the ball into the end zone and the Vikings returned it, which took the clock below two minutes.
Bears coach Ben Johnson later admitted that he should have just had Cairo Santos kick the ball out of bounds. He called for Santos to kick the ball out of the end zone, but his kick didn’t have the leg to send it 75 yards.
“At the end of the game, I felt like we could kick it out of the back (of the end zone), we weren’t able to get that done. In hindsight, I should’ve kicked it out of bounds,” the Bears coach said.
The situations are slightly different, but the principle is the same: The coach got greedy. In Arizona’s case, Gannon wanted Ryland to kick a returnable ball so that the Seahawks would have to burn a few seconds off on the play, and if that’s the case, why not just have Ryland kick a returnable ball instead of dealing with the risk that comes with a line drive.
If the Cardinals’ coaching staff didn’t ask for a line drive, then Ryland simply mishit the ball, and if that’s the case, Ryland could soon be in hot water. He already has two missed field goals this season and adding an errant kickoff to that could put the Cards in the market for a new kicker.