Kansas City Chiefs special teams coordinator Dave Toub did not mince words when asked for his reaction to President Donald Trump’s recent criticism of the NFL’s dynamic kickoff rule.
Toub – who has been a special teams coordinator at the NFL level since the 2004 season – made it clear during a Nov. 20 media availability that he doesn’t care what the president thinks about the play.
‘He doesn’t even know what he’s looking at. He has no idea what’s going on with the kickoff rule,’ Toub said, referencing Trump. ‘Take that for what it’s worth. And I hope he hears it.’
Toub’s comments come just over a week after Trump referred to the dynamic kickoff as ‘terrible’ during an appearance on ‘The Pat McAfee Show.’
‘I hate the kickoff in football. I think it’s so terrible, I think it’s so demeaning. I think it hurts the game and hurts the pageantry,’ Trump said during a Nov. 11 episode of the show. ‘I’ve told that to Roger Goodell. And I don’t think it’s any safer. I mean you still have guys crashing into each other.
‘The ball is in the air and nobody is moving. It’s supposed to be when the ball is in the air, when the ball is played you’re supposed to be moving. The pageantry of the game is so badly hurt. The NFL, they do what they want to do. I don’t think they’ll change. I hope college football doesn’t change, because the power of the kickoff was so beautiful.’
The NFL instituted the dynamic kickoff for the 2024 NFL season after it was used in the XFL’s 2020 and 2023 seasons. The goal of instituting the new kickoff was to create more return opportunities on kicks while limiting the amount of full-speed collisions that occurred during the old kickoff setup.
The NFL has claimed the dynamic kickoff has, thus far, been safer than the original kickoff while kick return rate rose from a historic low of 21.8% in 2023 to 32.8% in 2024, per the league.
And while the NFL hasn’t released full data for its kicks during the 2025 season thus far, the league reported after five weeks that kickoff return rate had increased to a massive 81.3%.