NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and the league’s competition committee are “mulling” a rule change that would move touchbacks to the 35-yard line, Mark Maske reported for the Washington Post.

A new rule taking touchbacks from the 25-yard line to the 30-yard line went into effect before the 2024 season.

The NFL and the competition committee “are not inclined to make any major in-season changes” and will likely wait until the 2025 campaign if they decide to adjust the rule again, Maske reported.

Maske’s report comes after Goodell said he expected the NFL to “make a few new changes” on the adjusted kickoff rule in a Tuesday appearance on NFL Network’s Good Morning Football.

“We always said this was going to be a work in progress. I guess, if I had to grade it, I’d say it’s an incomplete right now,” Goodell said (4:00 mark of the video below.) “Only in this sense: we wanted to bring back more returns, but we wanted to do it safely. So, we have more returns… that’ll give us more data to find out, is it working? Are we seeing the safety level go back to the same safety level that we see at the line of scrimmage plays?

“So far, that looks pretty good, but it’s really early to tell, and there’s really not enough data yet. I think it’s going to come out where we’ve brought the safety back into that play. And then I think we’ll have to make a few changes on the kickoff that will, I think, lead to a lot more kickoff returns.”

Goodell concluded: “You could do the touchback and move it to the 35. I think that would be a game-changer right away… I think there will be a change, whether we make it immediately or after the season. We’re going to have a competition committee in the next week or so.”

Kickoff return rates have been plummeting since the kickoff was moved forward to the 35-yard line in 2010, and fell further when the NFL decided to make any fair catch inside the 25-yard line a touchback prior to the 2023 season.

These prior rule changes, made by the NFL in the name of player safety after the league announced kickoffs were more likely than any other play to result in a concussion, led to fewer than a quarter of kickoffs being returned in 2023.

Approximately 29 percent of kickoffs have been returned so far 2024, a jump from the 17 percent return rate marked over the same span last season, per Maske.

That’s still far below the NFL’s original projections, which predicted that the new rule would result in a kickoff return rate of 55 percent in 2024, per ESPN’s Todd Archer.

The NFL’s current kickoff standard was added to the rulebook on a one-year basis, so the competition committee is already required to decide whether to extend or change the rule prior to the 2025 campaign. Whether the kickoff return return rate increases over the remainder of the season could determine the likelihood touchbacks move up another five yards next fall.