ORLANDO, Fla. — During the NFL’s annual meetings in Orlando in March, local EA Sports officials met with the league’s head coaches to take 3D scans of their heads for use in the next game, an annual procedure, when an unexpected question popped up.
“What are you guys going to do if the kickoff rule gets changed?” one coach asked the scanning employee, who didn’t know the answer.
Madden 25 already was in alpha stage, meaning the primary features were complete and the game had moved to fixing bugs before the Aug. 16 release. When the NFL’s competition committee passed the kickoff rule change at those owners’ meetings, EA Sports had to adjust.
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Making sense of NFL’s new kickoff rule and what it means for next season
“This is the most significant change to pro football in 25 years,” said Clint Oldenburg, EA Sports’ American football production director. “My initial thought was there’s no way we can ship the game without that.”
The new kickoff format will be in Madden 25, but it’s actively being tweaked and updated before launch. As part of the new rule, kickoffs still will happen from the 35-yard line, but the rest of the kickoff team will line up on the receiving team’s 40-yard line while receiving team blockers will line up at their own 35- and 30-yard lines. No player can move until the ball hits the ground or is caught by a returner.
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Oldenburg, a former NFL offensive lineman from 2007 to 2010, leads the football specifics seen in the game. He had to get the development team back into the game to add the new kickoff. A similar version of the rule was piloted by the XFL in 2020 and used again in 2023 with one returner, The game is supposed to emulate real NFL football, and many NFL fans may not know about the rule until they play Madden before the start of preseason games in August.
“For launch day, it has to work,” Oldenburg said of Madden’s plans for the rule. “Then, how can we improve or implement ways to teach our fans how this works? Whether that’s commentary lines, in-game indicators, we can onboard people before the season starts.”
The Madden 25 demo that a select group of reporters and I tested last month included the new kickoff, but options were limited. The new rule’s implementation simply won’t just move a few players around. NFL teams are still figuring out how they’ll approach the change. It could be blocked more like a running play than a kick return.
Pittsburgh Steelers running back Jaylen Warren’s comments on a podcast that the team had floated Justin Fields as a kick return option led to the quarterback waving aside that buzz in late May. The Kansas City Chiefs have considered taking Harrison Butker off kickoffs because kickers will have to tackle more. New England Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo said a better option might be kicking through the end zone for a touchback, allowing the ensuing drive to start at the 30-yard line.
How can the video game prepare for that unknown? Oldenburg said he and the EA Sports staff have held weekly calls with an active NFL coach (Oldenburg wouldn’t reveal the name of the coach) to talk strategy.
“We’re having calls with him to understand how the NFL is going to handle this,” Oldenburg said. “It gives us a unique opportunity to lead. We are going to be playing football and kicking off before the NFL. I hope you’re going to see us do things with the kickoff you may have never thought of before, and the NFL is going to follow us. That gets me excited.”
The help goes both ways. Since coaches have limited time with players, Oldenburg said the anonymous coach has been able to use Madden to simulate kickoff strategy.
“He’s never seen it before on an NFL field with NFL players,” Oldenburg said. “He was like, ‘I bet Madden’s working on this.’ We’re wondering what they’re going to do with this. We just developed a codependent relationship, and every week we’re building.”
In the XFL’s version of the rule, teams blocked one-returner formations with schemes similar to a run play, including trap, inside zone and outside zone. Double reverses and throwbacks were tested by the XFL but didn’t happen in games. With the NFL’s option to use two return men, however, there are more possibilities.
There are also more ways in which something unexpected can happen. The NFL experimented with moving back the extra point attempt in the 2014 preseason before adopting it for the 2015 season. There is no experiment with this change, and the NFL rule has some differences from the XFL rule that could lead to more exploitation.
All of this affects the video game. Should users have more control over where the ball is kicked off, like a line drive? The game incentivizes action; that’s why the NFL has more touchbacks in real life than in Madden. It’s up to Oldenburg and his team to make sure it’s both usable and fun.
For decades, kickoff playbooks in video games were simple, limited to just a handful of options. Now the Madden team has to create an entirely new formation’s worth of plays. Figuring out how to handle extra-point penalties on the kickoff is its own coding issue, and onside kicks will be limited to the fourth quarter in real life.
A pretty big change is coming to football strategy, and Madden is at the forefront of its execution.
“I can’t yet tell you how far we’ll get for launch,” Oldenburg said, “but we’re gonna keep building to do really cool stuff.”
(Photo of Justin Tucker: Robin Alam / ISI Photos / Getty Images)