When NFL owners officially approved a revolutionary change to the sport's kickoff format in March, coaches were forced into a situation that was likely uncomfortable for many of them: needing to plan for a play that had never been seen before.
In the months since, coaches have admitted they don't know what to expect. The Chiefs tossed out the notion of using safety Justin Reid at kicker for improved coverage capability. The Steelers even considered deploying quarterback Justin Fields -- known for his electric mobility -- as a returner.
That wasn't the only forward-thinking approach taken by Pittsburgh. Even before he could send his guys out to the practice field to test and tinker with the new format, head coach Mike Tomlin was already simulating outcomes on a virtual gridiron by working with the folks at EA Sports, makers of Madden NFL 25.
During a break at the Annual League Meeting, where the new kickoff format was approved, Tomlin was having his face digitally scanned by EA's art department for inclusion in the upcoming NFL title when he posed a question to an EA employee. The coach, who is a member of the Competition Committee, which developed and proposed the changes to the kickoff, asked what the company was planning to do with it in Madden.
Before long, Tomlin was communicating with the Madden gameplay team, hopping on Zoom calls while the Madden team played the game for Tomlin to watch, as EA Sports' Clint Oldenburg later told NFL.com. The Super Bowl-winning coach requested a number of changes, including personnel swaps and in-action manipulation (i.e., intentionally steering a returner away from blockers) with one key goal: to learn as much as possible about a play that had never been captured on film.
"We're going into uncharted territory with this kickoff concept," Tomlin said, in a statement provided by EA Sports. "There's actually no real visuals of the concept. My sons play all the EA Sports games. I have a lot of respect for the realism of their product. We reached out to those guys and wanted to just kind of get a visual, maybe, of some of the schematics -- how the alignment might affect the timing of blocks and so forth.
"That game is more than entertainment from my perspective -- it is a real simulator. As we all move into uncharted territory in terms of not knowing what these concepts look like, I viewed it as a potential tool to aid us in teaching and gaining some understanding and experience where there is none, while at the same time maybe helping them do what it is that they needed to do, because really they had the same issues that we did."
The issues began at the granular level, said Oldenburg, who serves as the company's American football production director. Before Tomlin and the Madden team could start tinkering with variables, they had to make sure the basics were addressed.
To complicate matters, the NFL didn't approve the new rules until after Madden had moved beyond building new features for the game and had advanced to alpha -- a period in which the team focuses on fixing bugs and polishing the game. This meant they had to double back to include the new format; launching a new NFL title without it was simply a non-starter.
"When we first started building it, at a basic level, we needed to understand how the rules were going to be applied," Oldenburg said. "Because just reading through the rules the NFL released to the public, there was a lot of gray area. There was a lot of stuff that was not necessarily explicitly called out. Not in the rulebook, no film, so we're sitting there going, 'How is this penalty going to be assessed? What happens if the ball hits someone in the safe zone?' Stuff like that that we have to put in to account for all of these different scenarios.
"So he was a great resource for us to be able to explain some of the nuance that he knew that the public didn't quite have yet. So it was really mutually beneficial. And then each week that we met, we would have a little more progress to show him."
With Tomlin guiding them, the gameplay team tried almost everything imaginable. They subbed in a tight end with a strong lead-block rating to see if a larger player with better blocking ability might be more beneficial at the point of attack. Remember the idea of using Fields as a returner? They tested that, too, giving Fields a useful role in an otherwise unorthodox situation.
Nothing was off limits in this football simulation lab. The group even went as far as inserting former NFL Defensive Player of the Year T.J. Watt at kicker -- which temporarily broke the game.
As the group continued to work, it was apparent the gears were turning in Tomlin's head. Before long, he was projecting how the rest of the NFL would adapt to the kickoff and feeding that information to the Madden team.
"When we first started talking to Coach Tomlin, it was about rules application and just making sure the basic black-and-white application was correct," Oldenburg said. "But what he started talking about kind of blew our minds about that level of strategy. He said, 'Initially, you're gonna see small people against small people, and you're gonna get a lot of big returns. And then the kicking team is gonna put big people out there, and the return team is going to have to start countering that with their own big people, and then it's going to turn into an offensive play, and it's going to do this and that.'
"The foresight that he was having as an NFL head coach was amazing to witness in real time as he was talking through what was going to happen, and how he was going to navigate these new rules. We started to play off of that. What can we do? What can we lead with that people have never seen before with these kickoff rules? They may think we're crazy when they first see it come out, but then they'll see it two or three months later in the NFL."
A cynic might be quick to ask a simple question: Can a video game really replicate football well enough to be used as a teaching tool? As it turns out, coaches have been turning to Madden for years, requesting special versions of the game that included their playbooks in order to educate their players virtually, well before the new kickoff format became a reality.
The symbiotic relationship between coaches and the game's developers has "been growing for a long time," Oldenburg said. "It continues to grow, and now for both Madden and College Football, the opportunities in the future for how this game is going to become a teaching tool really are pretty endless."
For this kickoff-focused effort, coaches who came from the XFL -- which featured a different version of this newfangled format -- served as a resource to the Madden gameplay team. The team even picked the brain of Sam Schwartzstein, who powered the creation of the XFL's version of the kickoff format during his time with that league before moving on to work with Amazon's "Prime Vision."
But Oldenburg indicated the Madden team made the most progress with Tomlin, who unsurprisingly proved himself as an outside-the-box thinker by turning to Madden to test his ideas and gain an understanding of the new world that faces the NFL, which will make its debut in Thursday's Hall of Fame Game.
Eventually, Tomlin led the Madden gameplay team -- which, Oldenburg said, is filled with self-admitted "football nerds" -- down a path of deeper thought, introducing ideas in which a return team might incorporate classic running schemes in order to create creases for returners. Members of the public who played the beta version of Madden NFL 25 likely noted blockers crossing the field in an attempt to create a trap, which led to big gains and occasional kick-return touchdowns. Most everything one might see in a running play became fair game for the developers and Tomlin.
"When he started down the process of, 'This is going to become like an offensive snap,' and when the whole thing happened with Justin Fields ... he told us specifically, 'I might try to run a read option. I don't know!' " Oldenburg recalled.
The Madden team now feels it has the kickoff in a good place that accurately reflects what NFL fans can expect to see on real-world fields this season. They've even used gameplay video to explain the new format to fans, rolling out informative content this week ahead of the Hall of Fame Game. Thanks to the inclusion of in-game aids -- e.g., visual designators for the landing zone, kick placement and supporting commentary -- the team expects the title to serve as an educator for every football fan who picks up a controller and plays Madden before the regular season kicks off. (The game is set to launch on Aug. 16.)
"That game is more than entertainment from my perspective -- it is a real simulator." -- Mike Tomlin, on 'Madden'
"This might be a little bit of an overstatement, but I feel like we're at the tip of the spear of getting people used to it," Oldenburg said.
"Fans who go into [Week 1] having never seen the new kickoff are going to be like, 'What is this? How does this work?' And they're going to start Googling stuff.
"The fans who play Madden before the NFL season starts are going to be fully aware of how they work, because not only have we added these new plays, these new mechanics, these new rules, but we've also added stuff in the game that's going to help onboard football fans to the new rules."
The changes are vast enough that they will look foreign to the average fan at first blush. Before long, though, football aficionados will come to understand the format and start tossing out their own ideas to improve it. Coaches will be steps ahead of them, setting up the possibility of in-season evolution that should only add to the excitement. And they can all move even further ahead of it by first testing it in Madden.
"People are going to be able to see things, do things, try out things -- we even have personnel packages now," Oldenburg said. "You can switch your personnel on both kickoff and kick return to have big people or small people, and see how that plays out. You can also change who your kick on snap is, so if you want to put a cornerback as a kicker, you can now do that in Madden. If you want to put a quarterback as your kicker returner, you can now do that in Madden.
"So there are things that people are going to find in our game and go, 'Whoa, this is weird. I don't know about this.' But we think you're going to see those things happen down the road as it evolves in the NFL."
This season, life will imitate art -- and as future editions of Madden reflect the changing game on the field, the cycle will continue.
