DR. JOHN'S NFL HEADACHE TONIC
The two biggest problems currently plaguing the league are fixable, writes John Kryk
Of all the rotten-news headaches the NFL has endured this season — from the anthem protests, to sliding TV ratings, to another drawn-out investigation and suspension of a star player based on shaky evidence — two have throbbed at the temples of league leaders, and outraged fans, for years.
Namely, (1) the “survive the ground” element of the catch rule, and (2) how potentially, even clearly concussed players can still be sent right back into a game, in spite of the adoption of cutting-edge, ingame protocols meant to wipe out such oversights once and for all.
Herewith, a suggested fix for each continuing dilemma.
THE CATCH RULE
How about this simple fix? Eliminate entirely the “complete the catch to the ground” element, which so confuses and infuriates everybody.
Defenders of that element’s inclusion, especially competition-committee members going back decades, would counter that eliminating this element would only lead to a lot of incompletions becoming caught-passes-turnedfumbles, which would lead to too many cheap fumble-return touchdowns.
I’m skeptical, even though the competition committee apparently has studies showing that such fumbles and easy scores would instantly becoming epidemic.
“(Former Dallas Cowboys president/GM) Tex Schramm many years ago said the phi- losophy we ought to follow is we do not want cheap fumbles,” Hall of Fame GM, former long-time competition committee chairman and ESPN commentator Bill Polian told me in a 2015 interview. “Because cheap fumbles do two things.
“No. 1, they turn the ball over, which is not a good thing from an offensive standpoint, and the committee’s charge was always to bend toward offence -to give the benefit of the doubt to the offence. “Secondly, and most importantly, fumbles in general lead to melees, and melees have the potential for injury.”
On the other hand, doesn’t it seem as though most controversial “complete the catch to the ground” plays come either out of bounds or, as in Sunday night’s Pittsburgh-New England game, after a touchdown was called on the field, and thus the play was blown dead? In both such cases, cheap returns aren’t even possible.
Polian was resolute in defence of pass catchers “surviving the ground” when they go down while attempting to catch a pass.
“We don’t want cheap fumbles. That’s the whole point,” Polian said.
“That’s what everybody misses. If you eliminated that, if you say the guy has two feet on the ground, and now is contacted and the ball comes out, what do we have? In every instance, now, we have an incomplete pass … It’s a frequent occurrence. By the competition committee’s philosophy, that’s an incomplete pass — not a fumble.”
Regardless, I say for one season — next season — the NFL should experiment with a catch rule where the only two requisites are (a) to secure possession of the football and (b) to get either two feet or any non-hands body part down in bounds. Period.
Replay only would be required, then, to verify these two requisites, rather than put under the replay microscope super-slo-mo footage of a receiver still sliding 15 feet out of bounds to see if the ball might have slightly twisted in his hands, etc.
If this suggested rule change should result in too many cheap catches, or too many cheap defensive scores, then it’d still be a valuable one-year experiment. Because it would act as a 17-week lesson for us all that, as annoying as it can be, the “complete the catch to the ground” element of the catch rule is indeed necessary.
If, however, games do not become fumble-paloozas, then the NFL will have punted the most confusing, most controversial, most hated rule from the book. Hopefully for good.
Also, and just as importantly, the rule would make what intuitively look to the naked eye to be catches and touchdowns, catches and touchdowns — not infuriating incompletions.