The Associated Press began naming an All-Pro kickoff returner in 1976; despite the name, it’s far from clear whether the voters drew a distinction between punt and kickoff returns. ^[1]In 2011, Patrick Peterson received the most votes of any kickoff returner, and he was therefore the first-team All-Pro selection. Only problem: Peterson, who had a magnificent year as a punt … Continue reading That was due in large part to some great returners beginning to enter the league. The previous year, Cardinal Terry Metcalf set an NFL with 2,462 all-purpose yards, and he ranked 3rd in punt return average and 2nd in kickoff return average. In Houston, Billy Johnson, of white shoes fame, had three punt returns for a touchdown in 1975. Pro Football Weekly named Johnson as its All-Pro returner that year, and beginning in ’76, the AP followed suit with a special slot dedicated to kickoff returners.

In the inaugural year, Denver’s Rick Upchurch earned first-team All-Pro honors from the Associated Press; that would happen two more times in his career. In the ’90s, Mel Gray also earned 3 first-team All-Pro returner nods from the Associated Press, and Devin Hester (’06, ’07, ’10) would later become the third player to earn three such honors.

In 2013, a rookie Cordarrelle Patterson earned 36 of 50 votes for the All-Pro kickoff returner spot, with a number of the other 14 votes actually going to punt returners. In 2015, Tyler Lockett (23 votes) was the AP’s first-team All-Pro returner, and he was great on both punt and kickoff returns that season. Patterson (who doesn’t return punts) averaged 6 more yards per kickoff return than Lockett, and received 15 votes; Darren Sproles (who didn’t return kickoffs) was the game’s top punt returner, and received 8 votes. Lockett was a worthy choice as the top returner overall, but Patterson was the top kickoff returner and Sproles the top punt returner.

Beginning in 2016, the Associated Press finally decided to fix this problem, and created two slots on the roster, naming a first-team punt returner and a first-team kickoff returner. But, of course, that arguably dilutes the value of being an All-Pro returner, since it’s easier now to make the AP’s All-Pro roster. In 2016, Patterson received 41 of 50 votes for the kickoff returner slot, while Tyreek Hill was a unanimous choice for the All-Pro punt returner position. The odds are that Hill would have been the first-team pick in ’16 had the AP not added the extra returner slot. In 2019, Patterson was again the clear choice as the game’s top kickoff returner, giving him 3 such AP first-team honors on his resume. And then yesterday, it was announced that Patterson again (and justifiably) ran away with the first-team All-Pro kickoff return honors.

Patterson is the most dominant kickoff returner of our era, and it is not particularly close. The graph below shows the 97 players with at least 25 kickoff returns since Patterson entered the NFL in 2013. Patterson has averaged 1.6 more yards per return than any other player, and he has nearly 2,000 more return yards than anyone else. He has 8 kickoff return touchdowns over the last 8 seasons; no other player has more than two. See if you can spot Patterson in the graph below.

The table below shows the Associated Press All-Pro returners for each season since 1976.

As always, please leave your thoughts in the comments. For the pre-1976 era, who would have likely been the choices?

1975: As written above,  Terry Metcalf and Billy Johnson both had monster years; Pro Football Weekly chose Metcalf, while the Football News chose Johnson.

1974: Probably Dick Jauron, who averaged 17 yards per punt return and was the Football News choice and a Pro Bowler; Metcalf was the second-team choice from FN.

1973: No organization named a returner before 1974, but Herb Mul-Key (Washington) and Greg Pruitt (Cleveland) were the Pro Bowl returners.

1972: Ron Smith led the NFL in kickoff return average and was named to the Pro Bowl; Mercury Morris and Bruce Laird both also made it as returners.

1971: Speedy Duncan led the NFL in punt return average and was fifth in kickoff return average; he and Morris made the Pro Bowl.

1970: Cecil Turner had 4 kickoff return touchdowns, while Lemar Parrish, who scored on both punt and kickoff returners, was the other Pro Bowl choice.

In 2011, the NFL moved kickoffs up from the 30-yard line to the 35-yard line; immediately after, kickoff return average climbed to a 23.7, the highest in NFL history. Kickoff returns dropped from 2,033 in 2010 to 1,374 in 2011, so it’s reasonable to conclude that the increase in average was a reflection of sample bias; with fewer kickoffs being returned, we can presume that returners were, on average, taking the ball out of the end zone in more advantageous situations. On the other hand, the average also spiked in 1994, when the kickoff was moved back from the 35 to the 30! In 1993, there were 1,381 kickoff returns; in 1994, there were 1,842. That spike seems harder to understand.

In any event, we will again adjust kickoff returns for era. I used essentially the same formula as I did to calculate the best punt returners:

1) Assign 15 yards for every kickoff return touchdown.

2) Calculate each player’s Adjusted Yards per Kickoff Return for each season, defined as simply (Kickoff Return Yards + 15*KRTDs) / Kickoff Returns.

3) Subtract the league average AY/KR rate from each player’s AY/KR average.

4) Multiply that result by the player’s number of kickoff returns, to produce a value-over-average statistic.

As before, this is far from a perfect solution. In fact, there may be even more shortcomings here than there was with punt returns, and I will again mention some of those at the end of this post. But I do think this system is an improvement over the current ways in which we measure kickoff returners, so let’s march onwards.

In 2013, the top kickoff returner was Cordarrelle Patterson, and the system surely does not succumb to any shortcomings here. The Vikings rookie led the NFL in both kickoff return average and touchdowns, and ranked second in yards to Devin Hester (who needed nine more returns to gain those extra 43 yards). Patterson averaged 33.1 adjusted yards per kickoff return; given his 43 returns and the NFL average of 23.4, that means Patterson provided 416 yards of value over average, easily the most in the league. The table below shows the amount of value added by every kickoff returner in 2013; by default, the table displays the top 10, but you can change that number in the dropdown box on the left. As always, the table is fully sortable and searchable, too.

Two Chiefs make it into the top 10; together, Quintin Demps and Knile Davis helped Kansas City lead the league in return average by 3.5 yards more than the next best team. Along with a great defense, the return units (remember, Dexter McCluster was the top punt returner of 2013) were the reason the Chiefs led the league in average starting field position (the 33.6-yard line). The bottom of this list is filled with “returners” who presumably covered a fair number of onside kicks and intentionally short kickoffs. Still, Arizona and Washington each have regular returners near the bottom, and both squads suffered from terrible return units.

Next, let’s look at the 300 best kickoff return seasons in football history using this metric. Of note: Patterson’s 2013 season was the 2nd best ever, behind only Josh Cribbs’ magnificent 2007 season (remember, that year, Cribbs also provided 142 yards of punt return value over average):

Cribbs was able to sustain a 31.2 AY/KR average over 59 kickoff returns, which makes him a worthy selection for the top returner. MarTay Jenkins is the single-season leader in kickoff return yards (how many people knew that?!), but he’s also the single-season leader in kickoff returns.

Travis Williams took four of his 18 kickoffs back for touchdowns, including two in the first quarter against the Browns. Deion Sanders’ 1992 season checks in at number 12, while Gale Sayers has three top-115 seasons. But the king here is undoubtedly Mel Gray; in addition to a top ten season in ’94, he had two other top-60 seasons, and four more in the top 250. Does that make him the best kickoff returner ever?

As before, I’m going to utilize two different methods to create career rankings. The first is to simply sum the values produced by each returner in every season of his career. But adding the grades for each season tends to award longevity over dominance, and a really bad season can cancel out a really good season. Some might think those are good aspects of the system, but when we think of the best returners, we tend to think of them at their best. So the other formula I used was to take 100% of each kickoff returner’s best season, 90% of their second best, 80% of their third best, and so on; I also did not include any season where the kickoff returner had a below-average grade.

Under either system, Gray stands out as the champ. His raw numbers are not incredibly impressive but that’s because he played in the dead ball era of kickoff returns. For example, his career AY/KR is 1.5 yards worse than Cribbs, but he provided over 500 more yards of value over the course of his career (despite having just 14 more returns). That’s because of the era adjustment (and since Gray was so dominant for so long and almost never below average, his “sum of all seasons” grade looks to be unbreakable). Here’s how to read Gray’s line: he played from 1986 to 1997, returned 421 kickoffs for 10,250 yards and 6 touchdowns, and averaged 24.6 AY/KR. If you add his value from each season of his career, he produced 1802 yards of value over the average kickoff returner; using the 100/90/80 system, Gray produced 1235 yards of value.