NFL finally catches up

THE NFL’s competition committee is hoping a couple of subtle modifications will finally address the most unanswerable question of recent seasons: What’s a catch?

The committee was expected to finalize changes on Tuesday that could be presented to owners at next week’s league meetings in Orlando, the Washington Post reported.

“We worked backward. We looked at plays and said: Do you want that to be a catch? And then we applied that to the rule,” Troy Vincent, the league’s executive VP of football operations, told the newspaper. “Slight movement of the ball (in the receiver’s hands), it looks like we’ll reverse that. Going to the ground, it looks like that’s going to be eliminated. And we’ll go back to the old replay standard of reverse the call on the field only when it’s indisputable.”

The updated rule, according to the report, “will require only that a receiver have control of the football, and any slight movement of the football in the receiver’s hands detected via replay review would not result in an incompletion.” —Peter Botte