Joe Judge is separated from it now, having left the New England Patriots in January and gone to Ole Miss to join an old buddy, Lane Kiffin, with whom he’s connected through Nick Saban.
But the seasoned NFL special teams coach was in the trenches for all the planning, the trial and error, and the meetings and negotiating surrounding the kickoff play over the past seven years. As he recalls it, it was February 2017 when the league invited a group of such assistants, one from each division, to a meeting to discuss the future of the play at that year’s combine. In ’18, the rules changed. Then they changed again. And now, again, this time much more dramatically.
So I figured with one of the most radical shifts to the game itself in years on the horizon, talking to Judge—now unencumbered by the competitive constraints that have most special teams coaches keeping their plans in their figurative back pockets—would help answer one of the biggest questions I’ve got for training camp.
“I hope so,” Judge said, from his summer vacation last week. “There’s been enough thought put into the play, enough planning and enough talking through the situations, the strategy and the unintended consequences. I think the coaches who have worked on this have done a really good job. I think it’s given an opportunity for the play to have an impact because you have to play the play. Ultimately in football, I’m a big fan of giving teams opportunities to win in different ways.
“This adds one more element that a team can invest in and make a strength and win with. I do think it’s going to be a success.”
Soon, we’ll have answers.
We’re just three weeks from the de facto end of the NFL summer.
Come the week of July 22, everyone will be in camp and focused on the fall. And with that in mind, as I start my own (relative) unplugging from pro football, we’ll use my final Monday column of the 2024 offseason to give you a look at what I think we’ll be talking about once the helmets are on, the chin straps are buckled and the bags are out of the shed.
Again, what the kickoff will look like in August, September and October is a big one, if one that’s been backburnered a bit since the owners voted the new rules through in March.
