A CATCH IS A CATCH IN NFL NOW
League also bans all players from lowering helmet to initiate contact
Our long, irrational nightmare is over.
“Completing the catch to the ground” is dead in the NFL.
League owners Tuesday unanimously voted in favour of a replacement catch rule, proposed by the league’s competition committee.
The 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 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 was the most hated in the book, if not in all of North American pro sports.
Competition 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 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 there will still be some subjectivity involved with the new rule — 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 chairman Rich McKay last Friday and again Monday said 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 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 bylaw proposals. One permanently liberalizes rules for timing, testing and administering physicals to draft prospects at a club’s facility. Another makes it easier to reacquire a waived player. Another allows clubs to trade a player on injured reserve. And another replaces the 10-day post-season claiming period with a 24-hour period.
CHANGE FOR PROTECTION
Meanwhile, in a landmark rule change aimed to protect NFL players as much from themselves as from others, owners unexpectedly banned all players from lowering their helmet to initiate contact with another player anywhere on the body, from head to toe.
Tacklers can no longer do it. Nor blockers, ball carriers, pass rushers, gunners — no one.
The rule reads simply: “Lowering the head to initiate contact with the helmet is a foul.”
Penalty for the foul? Fifteen yards, with the possibility of disqualification. If committed by a defender, it’s 15 yards plus an automatic first down.
McKay said coaches endorsed the rule as actively as the league’s health and safety principals.
“The coaches were most vociferous about, ‘Hey listen, this needs to change. The tactic needs to change, and we’re ready for change,’” McKay said. “So we decided that we would rewrite that point of emphasis and rewrite that clarification into a playing rule.”
It replaces the short-lived rule that banned contact led by the crown of the helmet, a foul seldom called since its implementation a few years ago.
“For us, this is a pretty significant change,” McKay said. “This is not situational protection.”
Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive VP of health and safety policy, said about one-third (38 per cent, the NFL says) of all concussions in 2015 were caused by helmetto-helmet hits, but that number shot up last season to nearly onehalf (46 per cent).
“I think this is a very proud day for the NFL,” Miller said.
The league’s chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Sills, had said in January with the release of 2017 season concussion numbers that the record high number — 190 — was unacceptable, and the league had to, and would, act fast on making the game safer.
“This is part of that response,” Sills said. “This is a very key component of that injury-reduction strategy.”
Chris Nowinski, co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation and often the NFL’s harshest critic when it comes to player safety regarding brain injuries, wrote in an email to Postmedia:
“Using penalties to encourage change to more safe behaviours is a proven method of improving outcomes. While I am sure some players and referees will struggle with the adjustment initially, having fewer head impacts is in the best interests of the players.
“I welcome this new rule trial, and am confident it will also be monitored closely to ensure it does not create more dangerous unintended consequences.”