As the Philadelphia Eagles get prepared to face the Chicago Bears on Monday night, NFL special teams coordinators are set to discuss a potential rule change to ban a loophole the Eagles have been exploiting.
Leave it to the Philadelphia Eagles to find a way to bend the rules and use loophole that could give the team an advantage. No one should be surprised, but unfortunately for Philadelphia another team has caught on to the Eagles' antics.
Last week against the Tennessee Titans
, the Eagles were taking advantage of the 12-man rule on special teams by sending out holder Braden Mann
to hold the kickoffs for Jake Elliott
. It's a rare instance in which it's legal to have a 12th man on the field.
The purpose of the rule was to prevent the ball from falling off the tee in bad weather conditions on kickoffs. After the ball is kicked, the holder must immediately return to the sidelines. However, the weather was fine last week in Nashville (besides the blistering heat) and yet Mann was still out there holding the ball on four of the five kickoffs.
Chicago Bears reporter Adam Hoge of CHGO
, who's becoming known as a special teams expert, seems to identified the reason why this is actually an issue ahead of Chicago's game against the Eagles
. It turns out, Mann was holding the football at an angle, without the tee, allowing Elliott to hit a better "dirty" kick.
It's not the first instance of a team doing this, but it only takes another party to make a big deal about it for something to be changed. And it seems like that is exactly what is about to happen.
For more context, the "dirty" kick was a new kickoff method under the new kickoff rules in which the kicker hits the ball like a knuckle ball causing it to wobble in the air and then bounce unpredictably while still landing in the landing zone. That buys time for the coverage unit to rally to the ball, and also prevents the ball from going further, resulting in a touchback, thus forcing the defender to return more kickoffs.
Funny enough, all four kickoffs in which Mann was out there landed inside the landing zone and was returned by Titans kick returner Chimere Dike , who averaged just over 25 yards per return. The one kickoff without Mann holding the ball, resulted in a touchback.
"This past year, it changed to where you could use it at any time," Bears special teams coordinator Richard Hightower said of using the holder on kickoffs. "But the intent of the rule – and we are all going to get together on this and get this fixed – because the intent of the rule is a ball is supposed to be in a tee. It's not to be used like you guys have seen it used here lately. We're all getting together here shortly and we hope to get that fixed and corrected within the language of everything in the rulebook."
To Hightower's point, the issue isn't the holder. It's the fact that Mann wasn't using a tee while holding the ball, allowing him to alter the angle of the football. And so the NFL special teams committee plans to have a meeting aimed to discuss this issue, and potentially require kickoffs to always be held on a tee, with or without a holder present.
The Eagles have already caused a big fuss last year in their exploitation of the tush push and the missed false starts that the Eagles offensive line were doing, which nearly forced the NFL to ban the play this offseason. Now, NFL special teams coaches plan to take a closer look at this kickoff loophole more closely, and we could see a decision be made as soon as before Monday night's game against the Bears.
This article was originally published on A to Z Sports. Read the full story here: Eagles could force NFL rule change not even three weeks into the 2026 season, and the Bears are the ones pushing for it to happen
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