Is it a squib? A knuckleball? A dirty kick?
Whatever you call it, the Rams' kickoff keeps causing trouble.
When kicker Joshua Karty boots the ball to opponents, he tries to punch it into the landing zone (inside the opposing 20) with no spin. Nobody knows where the ball will go off the bounce, kind of like a knuckleball when it leaves the pitcher's hand. This puts the returners on their heels (sometimes literally) and disrupts the rhythm of the return operation. It's incited muffs, indecision, penalties and, most importantly, poor starting field position for L.A.'s opponents.
"You gotta try to think of it like it's a knuckleball, so you're trying to kick it without any spin," Karty told theRams.com. "If you kick it too high it's gonna be short of the landing zone, if you kick it too low, it's gonna be a touchback out of the air... I have a feel of just trying to hit toward the middle of the ball and just swing out and try and get it to do some weird stuff."
The league average field position after a kickoff through four weeks is just past the 30-yard line, but the Rams' opponents have started just past the 23 on average, the lowest mark allowed by any team.
Karty leads all individual kickers in that metric, with opponents starting inside the 22-yard line. Of his 20 kickoffs, 11 have resulted in starting field position at or inside the 20 (55%). No other kicker has done that more than six times or at a higher rate than 31.3%, according to nflverse data.
The Rams' "dirty kickoff" operation, as it's being called, has been the most effective in the league this year by a wide margin, but they aren't the only team employing this strategy. The Carolina Panthers are also bouncing the ball into the landing zone, but their opponents are starting near the 26-yard line on average.
L.A.'s success wasn't simply born from the idea, but earned through pristine planning and execution.
"There's been a lot of intentional work of understanding, 'Alright, how do we want to hit it? Where do we want to hit it? Do they have two returners back? Do they have one returner back? Where are those sweet spots?'" said head coach Sean McVay.
The new kickoff rules stipulate that touchbacks through the air go out to the 35-yard line rather than the 30. Last season, the average return went out to around the 29-yard line, so it didn't seem worth the risk to give opponents a chance to break off a big gain, said special teams coordinator Chase Blackburn. But once touchbacks were moved up five yards, the Rams' staff started strategizing, thinking of ways they could gain an edge, McVay said.
The coverage team can start moving once the ball hits the ground, which makes the time between the first bounce and the start of the return the equivalent of the new hang time from an analytics perspective, Blackburn said.
This kickoff approach requires a different ball flight and contact point than a field goal or a deep kickoff. Still, Blackburn said they've tried to make the leg swing as similar as possible so that the motion is familiar and the risk of injury is minimized. Deciding on that specific approach took a lot of trial and error, but now it looks "pretty seamless" for Karty.
"Just working at it and continuing to move where he's setting the ball up, where you put it on the hash, where everything's at, what his leg swing looks like," Blackburn said.
Blackburn and assistant special teams coach Ben Kotwica came up with the "dirty kickoff" idea before OTAs, and Karty started practicing it during those team activities. The first time he executed the kick correctly, Karty thought to himself, "Holy s*, this is gonna be a problem." And that, it has.
"His philosophy is basically that it's a law of averages," Karty said. "If you can get some good kicks that land in the landing zone, roll around and we can tackle them inside the 25 or the 20, that will equal out with a kick that's short of the landing zone or a touchback every once in a while."
Through four weeks, Karty has yet to miss the landing zone, so there have been no poor results to average out the successful ones. It seems those months of practice during the spring and summer have paid dividends, and Karty will only get better with more in-game experience.
Blackburn said that Kotwica compared kicking the ball in the landing zone to hitting it onto the green in golf (something Karty understands well based on his Instagram feed). As long as they can avoid water balls (touchbacks and kicks short of the landing zone), they have a good chance to score under par.
"(The success is) a lot to do with the ball getting on the ground," Blackburn said. "... I think the kicking style is a lot to do with it, to be quite honest. I wish I could say it was something really huge schematically we were doing, reinventing the wheel, but hitting a great kick to get it on the ground and create hang time to allow our guys to get a head start, that's the biggest difference."
The Rams own three of the top-10 performances this season in terms of average opponent field position off kickoffs. The top kicking performance of the season came from Karty in Week 3, when his six kickoffs pinned Philadelphia at an average starting field position just beyond its own 15.
Four of those kicks were muffed before a returner could advance the ball, a common occurrence when attempting to play Karty's knuckleballs off the bounce. Nobody knows that better than Rams running back and kick returner Blake Corum, who had to deal with them all offseason in practice.
"It's definitely difficult just because of the spin of it," Corum said "Once it hits the ground, you don't know if it's going to go right, left, to you, it might bounce and go over your head."
In Week 4 against the Colts, L.A. didn't enjoy the same efficiency it had through three games. But when it mattered most, Karty and the coverage team came through. The Rams were up seven with less than two minutes remaining when Karty's dirty kick was returned to the 21-yard line, but a holding penalty brought the Colts back to their own 11 when a blocker, seemingly thrown out of sync by the bounce, tried a bit too hard to create a lane.
Quarterback Daniel Jones tried to force the ball downfield to make up for their poor field position, and safety Kam Curl intercepted it. L.A. iced the game from there.
The Rams will need every possible advantage on Thursday when they play the 49ers on a short week, and these kickoffs could certainly provide that edge.
"Credit to Karty and the way he's been able to get the ball on the ground and his different styles of kick and manipulate the returners and hit it where they're not," Blackburn said.
