The Baltimore Ravens are an organization with long-valued special teams and how they impact the game. The fact that their head coach is a former special teams coordinator increases the value the team puts on that side of the ball, and it has paid off in a significant way.
When asked how the NFL’s new kickoff rules could impact the game moving forward, Baltimore head coach John Harbaugh said that he’s happy that kickoff returns will be back in football, and he’d rather have this than what had been done in the past.
“As far as the new kickoff rule, I love the fact that kickoff returns are going to be back in the game. I’m kind of on record saying [that] I wish they would have looked at a couple other things before taking the line of scrimmage out of the kickoff [and] kickoff return play, because the onside kicks and all that are still pretty cool, and they had already taken the wedges out and the double teams out. If you create some space for the kickoff return team to operate, maybe that would have slowed the kickoff team down; that was a theory. But they went all in with this new rule, and I’d rather have this than what we had in the past, where they were going all in for fair catches; we were never in favor of that. So, I think [commissioner] Roger [Goodell] really wanted kickoff return back in the game, and that’s good; that’s a good thing.”
The NFL’s new rules have changed the way teams have viewed special teams. Teams across the league are now placing more emphasis on special teams-only players. The Ravens have already been doing that for a long time, but now more teams are following suit.