Onside Kicks in EF

[Joe Greco]

In a game over the weekend a coach needed to complete an onside kick in order to have a chance to win the game. Based on the rules for recovering an onside kick that we were playing under he really had almost no chance to recover the ball.

I was trying to find the actual percentage of successful onside kick recoveries in the NFL and the only information that I could find (without spending a lot of time on this) was that in the 2004 season 23% (12 out of 52) of "anticipated" onside kicks were successfully recovered.

I had heard that in either Baltimore or D.C. they had a good system for allowing a reasonable percentage of successful onside kicks (but I did not find out what that method was).

If you could please let me know what method other leagues are using that may allow a reasonable percentage of onside kicks to be recovered.

Thanks.

Joe G