The Detroit Lions were begrudgingly conservative on kickoffs in 2024. Here’s why that’s about to change.
Last year, the Detroit Lions kickoff strategy was relatively simple. For most of the season, they decided it was better to boot it into the endzone and give the offense a touchback—setting the ball at the 30-yard line. Detroit posted the sixth-highest rate in touchbacks in the NFL (77.3%).
A lot of teams adopted the same strategy, figuring that the offense starting there was a better tradeoff than risking a long return. So the NFL made a tweak to this rule, moving the touchback up to the 35-yard line.
Lions special teams coordinator Dave Fipp admitted this will shift their strategy, as giving up field position at the 35-yard line is just too significant an advantage.
“A year ago, the touchback went at the 30, and I think, as you guys saw at the end of the year, the average drive started at the 29.5 or something like that. So there was no real benefit–if you wanted to be average—there was really no benefit to obviously kicking the ball off and returning it,” Fipp said. “But this year, if you said the average is the 29.5 and the touchback is the (35), then obviously there’s statistically incentive.”
But here’s the interesting part: the Lions wanted to be a little more aggressive last year. Fipp is the kind of coach that doesn’t want to be “average.” He wants to trust his coverage team to stop returners before the 30 and give his defense a clear advantage. The problem was the actual kick plays a huge part in coverage strategy, and they weren’t ready to trust what was essentially a rookie kicker in Jake Bates.
“That wasn’t necessarily his strength going into the season,” Fipp said. ”We didn’t want to add a whole lot to his plate, and it was going to be–the kick may change throughout the course of the year, so now we’re saying, ‘Okay, kick it like this. Okay, kick it like that. Okay, kick it like this.’ And then, ‘By the way, hey, let’s do a great job kicking field goals for the first time in the National Football League.’ So maybe not a great formula. So we kinda stayed away from some of that to help him a little bit, to be honest with you.”
After a very successful season kicking field goals (26-of-29, including six conversions of 50+ yards), Bates is already expanding his arsenal to strategic kickoffs, and Fipp has been encouraged by what he sees. With that extra weapon at his disposal—and more data on the play from last season—the Lions special teams coordinator is eager to get a lot more aggressive during kickoffs in 2025.
“We’ll play a lot more on the attack,” Fipp said. “A lot more aggressive, a lot more trying to create negative field position for those guys (rather) than kind of playing it conservatively and not give up the big play (which) was a little bit more of our mentality a year ago.”