Good riddance
Surviving the ground dead in the NFL! New catch rule passes
ORLANDO, Fla. — Our long, irrational nightmare is over. “Completing the catch to the ground” is dead in the NFL.
League owners on Tuesday morning unanimously voted in favour of a replacement catch rule, proposed by the league’s competition committee.
The new, streamlined rule no longer includes thick language describing the despised concept requiring a pass catcher to maintain firm possession of the ball throughout the process of falling to the ground. Or “completing the catch to the ground.” Or “surviving the ground.”
The new rule requires only (a) control of the ball, (b) either two feet down or another body part, and (c) a football move (such as, but not limited to, a third step down or reaching the ball forward) or the ability to have performed such a move.
The old catch rule had been the most hated in the book, if not in all of North American pro sports.
The new rule, if retroactively enforced, would have made catches of the infamous Dez Bryant (2014 playoffs vs. Green Bay) and Jesse James (December 2017 vs. New England) incompletions, both of which looked for all the world like good catches but were overturned on replay.
Since commissioner Roger Goodell said at his annual ‘state of the league’ address before last month’s Super Bowl that he wanted the competition committee to try to come up with a clearer and less controversial rule, committee members pored over catch/no-catch plays going back decades.
They decided as a group to pick borderline plays they wanted to be catches, then set about drafting rule language to make them catches.
“The language they came up with, I thought, was very good,” Cincinnati Bengals head coach Marv Lewis, who until this year was a longtime committee member, said on Tuesday. “People can understand it a little bit better. And the subjectivity can be defined and cut down a little bit, which is good.”
Lewis rightly pointed out that there still will be some subjectivity involved with the new rule — for instance, not everyone will always agree on whether a pass catcher had the time and ability to perform a football move — and that there will be more catches ruled now, as well as more fumbles.
But competition committee chair Rich McKay last Friday and again Monday said that the committee couldn’t find many examples of fumbled balls after a receiver impacted the ground in the field of play — plays that, in the past, would have been ruled incomplete but now will be ruled completions, then fumbles.
Owners on Tuesday — the last full day of the league’s annual meeting — approved two other of 10 playing-rule proposals. One makes permanent the experimental rule to spot the ball at the 25-yard line after a touchback, rather than the 20. The other allows the central replay command operation in New York City to instruct on-field officials to disqualify a player for “a flagrant football act when a foul for that act is called on the field.”
Six other playing-rules proposals had yet to be voted on. A seventh — limiting defensive pass interference to 15 yards except when the foul is egregious and intentional — was pulled Monday by the New York Jets.
Owners also approved four of 12 by-law proposals. One permanently liberalizes rules for timing, testing and administering physicals to draft prospects at a club’s own facility. Another makes it easier to reacquire a waived player. Another allows clubs to trade a player on IR. And another replaces the 10-day postseason claiming period with a 24-hour period.