page_title: Onside kick
section_title: Modern American football usage
hierarchical_section_title: Onside kick / Modern American football usage
caption_attribution_description: The California Golden Bears line up to attempt an onside kick during a home game against the Oregon State Beavers. The Beavers recovered the ball and won 31-14.
context_page_description: In gridiron football, an onside kick is a kickoff deliberately kicked short. On most kickoffs, the kicking team concedes possession of the ball and tries to kick it as far as possible from its own goal. In an onside kick, however, the kicking team kicks short in hopes of regaining possession of the ball before the receiving team can control it.
  The onside kick is a low-percentage play, generally only seen late in a game when the kicking team is trailing in the score and must retain possession of the ball in order to score before time expires. However, its chances of success increase in a situation where the returning team does not expect it.
context_section_description: Starting in 1923, the following additional constraints in most forms of American football are relevant to the onside kick:
  The kick must be a free kick (a kickoff, or free kick after a safety; in high school football, but not the NFL, the rare fair catch kick can also be recovered onside).
  The kick must cross the receiving team's restraining line (normally 10 yards in front of the kicking team's line), unless the receiving team touches the ball before that line.
  The kicking team may only recover and retain possession of the kicked ball, but not advance it.
  The kicking team must not interfere with an attempt by a player of the receiving side to catch the ball on the fly.
  Unlike during a punt — where if the kicking team catches or recovers the ball, it is "downed" and the receiving team possesses the ball — during a free kick, a ball that has crossed the receiving team's restraining line is normally a live ball, such that if the kicking team catches or recovers the ball it retains possession. "Onside" is therefore now a misnomer in American football; an onside kick is simply any free kick that is kicked in a particular way to give the kicking team the best chance of regaining possession — typically in a diagonal direction and as close to the advancing players from the kicking team as possible. 
  The kicking team generally attempts to make the ball bounce early (to remove the possibility of being charged with interfering with a catch) and be available around 20 yards in front of the spot of the kick.  One technique, useful especially on a hard or artificial surface, is to kick the ball in a way that it spins end-over-end near the ground and makes a sudden bounce high in the air. The oblong shape of an American football makes it bounce unpredictably, increasing the possibility that the receiving team will muff the catch.  An alternative is to kick the ball with a great deal of force directly at an opposing player.  If the ball touches the player, but he cannot secure it, it becomes live regardless of whether it has traveled 10 yards.
  When the receiving team expects an onside kick, it often fields a "hands team" of players skilled at catching or otherwise securing the ball.
  Traditionally, the onside kick had its own formation, in which the other ten players of the kicking team would line up on one side (left or right) of the kicker, in an effort to get as many people as possible into one area of the field. This is still popular in high school football; however, the NCAA (and later the NFL) now require that at least four players line up on each side of the kicker. To combat this, some teams (including the Buffalo Bills, who pioneered this strategy) developed a "cluster formation" in which all of the players line up behind and immediately next to the kicker in what is effectively a moving huddle. The NFL eventually banned this, too, with a 2009 rule change that states that "the kicking team cannot have more than five players bunched together"; the rule change has been considered a gratuitous targeting of Bills special teams coach Bobby April, as the ostensible reason for the ban (injury risk) had negligible evidence to support it. Effective with the 2018 season, the NFL requires that the kicking team line up with five players on each side of the ball. Additionally, the kicking team's players must line up in a specified configuration—on each side of the ball, at least two players must be between the sideline and the numbered yard markings, and at least two must line up between the numbers and hashmarks. At the same time, the NFL also required that at least eight members of the receiving team line up within the 15-yard "setup zone" (between 10 and 25 yards from the kickoff spot).
  In 2018, the NFL also mandated that no member of the kicking team, apart from the kicker, could line up more than 1 yard from the spot of the kickoff. Previously, all members of the kicking team could line up as many as 5 yards from the kickoff spot, allowing that team to make a running start toward an onside kick.
  An onside kick is usually a desperation 
caption: California lines up to attempt an onside kick against Oregon State in a November 2009 American football game. Oregon State recovered the ball.
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