Dieter Kurtenbach: 49ers WR Skyy Moore was once a third baseman. That could prove handy against the Rams.

Dieter Kurtenbach, The Mercury News on Oct 1, 2025

Published in Football

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — You’ll probably be in the bathroom or kitchen when the coolest new play in the NFL happens on Thursday night.

That’s when Rams kicker Joshua Karty, formerly of Stanford, will set up a ball on a tee, swing his right leg through it, and let all hell break loose.

Karty and the Rams have pioneered a new kind of kickoff this season — the knucklekick. It has been a game-changer for Los Angeles and a nightmare for opponents through four weeks.

Now it’s the 49ers’ turn to be bewildered by it.

The Rams have kicked off 23 times this season. Their opponents’ average ensuing field position is the 23-yard line.

That’s 12 yards better than the NFL’s new touchback mark. It’s eons better than any other team in the NFL, save for the Carolina Panthers, who have adopted the knucklekick as well. The 49ers have 10 fewer yards, on average, behind them on defense at the start of post-score possessions than the Rams this season.

This is a big deal, folks.

Here are the nuts and bolts of the play: The NFL’s new kickoff rules mandate that a touchback brings the ball out to the 35-yard line in 2025. To avoid this, you can kick the ball into the “landing era” (the opponent’s 20-yard line to the goal line) on kickoffs. And inside that zone, the ball is live — meaning the returning team must actually return it.

So Karty, Rams special teams coordinator Chase Blackburn, and assistant special teams coordinator Ben Kotwica came up with a plan to make that last part as difficult as possible.

Karty kicks a ball with no spin, causing it to dart and dive in unpredictable ways, like a knuckleball pitch in baseball. And because Karty has the uncanny ability to consistently put that kind of kick inside the 20-yard line, opponents’ returners have to figure out a way to play a ball with movements they can’t read.

It creates situations where returners are turning their backs to 10 men running straight at them with bad intentions, bobbled balls, confusion between returners and general play that deserves a Benny Hill theme song soundtrack.

“Anytime you can’t catch it clean, the timing of just how you block and everything’s off,” 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan said of what he calls the “dirty ball.” “So [the kick coverage team] get[s] back there a lot faster ... A lot more penalties happen, too, with holding and stuff. So, the dirty ball’s a huge part of this game with the new kickoffs. It’s not an easy thing to do for everybody.”

In the past few years, the Tush Push has been the talk of football. It, in effect, gave the Eagles a first-and-9 or even a first-and-8 while everyone else needed 10 yards for a first down — it was that automatic a play for the defending Super Bowl champions.

Add that kind of advantage up over the course of a game, a month, a season, and it’s a huge differentiator. There’s a Lombardi Trophy in Philadelphia to prove it.

The knucklekick might be an even bigger advantage.

But don’t expect the Niners to follow Rams’ lead, or even the copycat Panthers’, and try to rip the play off.

“You always look into it. Every team does,” Shanahan said. “There’s a lot of risky things to it.”

Shanahan is content to let other teams try. He’s not one for risk — any risk — on special teams.

Because like with the Tush Push, not everyone will be able to do the knucklekick, and some people are going to look really foolish trying.

This week, 49ers receiver and returner Skyy Moore is the unlucky soul tasked with corralling this hot potato.

Moore told me he’s practiced against the knucklekick by having Niners kicker Eddy Piñero kick a few his way. He also has a Jugs machine set up to send no-spin balls at him — but that set-up is kind of an involved process.

Primarily, he’s relying on instinct and positive thinking.

“[I’m] just trying to go out there with the mindset that I have to field everything. Just look it into the tuck and try to get a good position on it,” Moore told me, before stopping and acknowledging the truth:

“You never know where it’s going to go, though, so it’s hard to simulate it.”

Moore’s time playing third base as a kid might come into play. There’s no corner hotter than the area between the sideline and the goal line with a ball bouncing a funny way towards you.

(Speaking of which, is Matt Chapman available on Thursday? The Niners could use that glove, and they certainly have a roster spot.)

It’s all quite diabolical, and in a divisional game on a short week — a recipe for a tight game, even with all the Niners’ injuries — the kickoff difference between teams could be the difference.

So forget Matt Stafford’s no-look throws, Fred Warner’s shot-out-of-a-cannon tackles, Christian McCaffrey open-field runs, or Puka Nacua’s no-regard-for-human-life rumbles — the good stuff two teams fighting for NFC West and overall conference supremacy put on the field every week and will bring to SoFi Stadium Thursday.

No, pay attention to the most ignorable play in sports: the kickoff.

That is where Thursday’s real excitement will be.

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