NFL Coach Interprets New 'Anytime' Onside Kick Rule As License, Declares One During National Anthem

JACKSONVILLE, FL — Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Rex Callahan declared an onside kick during Sunday's national anthem, telling officials the league's new rule permitting a kickoff team to attempt one "at any time during the game" left him no reasonable alternative.

The rule, approved this offseason to let any team attempt a surprise onside kick rather than only clubs trailing late, was intended to add strategic unpredictability to kickoffs. Callahan has instead treated it as a standing writ. Sunday's anthem kick traveled eleven yards before a Jaguars special-teamer recovered it near the fifty, at which point the singer, a ninth-grader from Ponte Vedra, was still on the word "brave."

"The rule says anytime," Callahan said afterward, holding up a printed copy of the rule with the word "anytime" circled four separate times. "I read it to my legal team. I read it to my wife. Nobody could find me a time that wasn't anytime."

League officials confirmed the kick was technically legal, since the anthem occurs after the coin toss and before the opening kickoff, a window the rulebook does not explicitly forbid. NFL senior vice president of officiating Bruce Halloway called it "not what we meant, but not not what we wrote," and said the league would "look at clarifying language sometime before this becomes a real problem."

It became a real problem the following Thursday, when Callahan declared a second onside kick during the pregame coin toss itself, recovering the flipped quarter along with the ball and forcing referees to restart the ceremony from a folding table. A third came during the opposing kicker's postgame interview, a fourth during a stadium proposal on the video board, the ball skittering past the kneeling boyfriend before a Jaguars rookie corralled it at the ring box. The boyfriend's fiancée said yes anyway, calling the interruption "honestly on brand for our relationship."

A study released this week by the Sports Officiating Research Consortium found that 61 percent of NFL head coaches now interpret "anytime" as covering any moment in which a football is anywhere near a stadium, up from 9 percent before the rule change. Consortium director Dana Prewitt said the finding "should alarm anyone who has ever used the word 'anytime' loosely in a legal document," adding that her own team had begun using "at a specific, enumerated time" in all future paperwork.

Callahan, for his part, has begun carrying a football to press conferences, city council meetings, and, according to one assistant coach, his daughter's piano recital, "just in case a window opens up."

At press time, the league's competition committee had scheduled an emergency session to redefine "anytime" as "during a kickoff," a phrase four separate lawyers confirmed already existed in the original rule and had simply gone unread.