NFL's most bizarre penalty: Bengals got flagged for breaking an unusual rule after punting an onside kick

There wasn't much drama during the final two minutes of Detroit's 37-24 win over Cincinnati, but anyone who stuck around to watch Sunday's game got to witness some history when the officials threw a penalty flag in a situation where they had never done so before. With 1:49 left, Bengals quarterback Jake Browning got sacked for a safety by Detroit's Derrick Barnes.

That's when things got interesting. With the Bengals trailing by 13, they did what any team would do in that situation and decided to attempt an onside kick.

However, since this was a kickoff after a safety, the Bengals were allowed to punt the ball. So, that's exactly what they did.

Yup, the Bengals decided to punt an onside kick.

Instead of hitting the ball on the ground, Cincinnati's plan was to have punter Ryan Rehkow hit a punt high into the air with hopes that the Lions would muff the kick while trying to field it. 

In the image below, you can see what Cincinnati's kicking formation looked like. 

Under the NFL's new kickoff rules, a team has to declare an onside kick, so the Lions knew that an onside kick was coming.

The other part of the new kickoff rule is that the ball has to land in the setup zone on an onside kick. There's a 15-yard setup zone and, on this specific kick, the zone was from Cincinnati's 30-yard line to its 45.

If the Bengals were to kick the ball beyond the 45-yard line, that would be a penalty. And that's exactly what happened. Rehkow hit a sky-high punt and Amon-Ra St. Brown called for a fair-catch at the 46-yard line, which was a yard BEYOND the setup zone.

The penalty for kicking the ball out of the setup zone on an onside kick is among the NFL's most brutal: The kicking team gets flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct, but the painful part is that the 15-yard penalty gets tacked on from where the BALL WAS KICKED.

On a normal kickoff, which takes place at the 35, this means that the receiving team would get the ball at the kicking team's 20-yard line after the 15-yard penalty's enforcement. However, the Bengals' kickoff was from the 20-yard line, since it was after a safety. Because the ball was inside the 30, the unsportsmanlike became a "half the distance to the goal line" penalty, and the Lions' offense got to take over from Cincinnati's 10-YARD LINE.

That's right: A penalty on a kickoff gave Detroit possession 10 yards from a possible touchdown. However, the Lions decided that they didn't need anymore points, so they just had Jared Goff take a knee to end the game.

If the onside kick had gone out of bounds, that would have created an entirely different scenario. In that situation, the Lions would have been able to take possession at the spot where the ball went out of bounds or a spot 25 yards from where the ball was kicked (in this case, Cincinnati's 45-yard line).

Hitting the ball out of bounds is bad, but kicking the ball out of the setup zone is pretty much the most painful penalty that a team can be hit with since it automatically gives the opponent the ball in the red zone.

This rule has only been on the books since the start of the of the 2024 season, when the dynamic kickoff was introduced, and the Bengals became the first team ever to be hit with an unsportsmanlike penalty for having an onside kick land outside the setup zone.