As a blocker on the kickoff return team, New York Giants fullback Madison Hedgecock sometimes joined the wedge formation that linked three or four teammates to plow a path for the ball carrier.
The tactic was efficient but sometimes dangerous to players on both teams, and Hedgecock said on Monday that he was happy a new NFL rule makes it illegal for more than two men to block together on kickoffs.
“Since I’ve been in the league, I’ve known probably at least six guys that have been injured permanently,” Hedgecock, who is beginning his fifth season, said of the wedge. “Guys get their necks broke. They get knocked out cold; eye orbital injuries. I mean bad stuff. It needed to be addressed.”
The NFL competition committee tackled the problem in the off-season. After studying films of kickoff plays and their resulting injuries, the eight-member board suggested the rule change to the team owners.
The team owners voted, 29-3, to eliminate the wedge, according to Mike Pereira, the league’s vice president for officiating.
His game officials are touring training camps now to inform players and news media about the rule. Last season, he said, 30 of 32 teams used some form of wedge blocking.
But it will take game experience to see the effects, and Pereira said the NFL would be watching for consequences.
“Will you have more full-speed hits on the returner?” Pereira asked, rhetorically. “We certainly didn’t want to expose the return men.”
Tom Quinn, the Giants’ special-teams coach, said: “You might need a little more elusiveness back there” by ball carriers on runbacks because defenders will have more seams to breach.
But he also predicted: “The kickoff return average is probably going to go up.”
Quinn said the rule presented challenges.
Many coaches, he said, “are trying to find a little piece of the rule and tweak it and take it right to the edge.”
He said there was also a possibility of “some bigger collisions, because now you could have a couple of double teams.”
John Mara, the president and a part-owner of the Giants, was on the competition committee and was one of the owners who voted to ban the wedge, Pereira said.
One of Mara’s players, linebacker Jonathan Goff, sustained a concussion last season at a game in Philadelphia while trying to break a wedge on a kickoff. Goff offered little reaction on Monday to the change in the rule.
“It will make it a little more challenging for the kickoff-return side,” Goff said. “Without the wedge, there probably will be more man-to-man blocking.”
That is a prospect that intrigues Chase Blackburn and Bryan Kehl, two linebackers who cover the kickoffs and, like Goff, worked as wedge-busters.
“It’s better for me,” Blackburn said, speaking as a member of the coverage team. “But on kickoff returns, it hurts us that way because we’re a wedge team.”
But Kehl said the new rule would not eliminate the danger and violence from the kickoffs.
“Kickoff is not for the faint of heart,” Kehl said.
Coach Tom Coughlin said on Monday that he accepted the premise that the rule was changed to lessen injuries, but he did not seem certain of how it would work in practice.
“We will see whether those safety reasons help us take care of the runner or not,” Coughlin said. “You still have the two-man wedge. I think it is going to take a little time to assess where we are, whether it is a good thing for the return team or a good thing for the cover team.”
Hedgecock predicted more hard hits on the returner but said he expected an overall improvement in safety.
“You know, when people are trying to make a team, they’re going to run down there macho style and they’re going to attack the man and try to put him out,” he said. Under the new rule, he said, kickoffs “should be exciting to see.”
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