Announcer makes a Super Coll’ on catches

SINCE Sunday night, NBC’s Cris Collinsworth has been bashed for his takes on the replay rules during the Super Bowl. Those attacks are not only unfair, they’re ignorant in view of what the NFL has done and become. Since 1990, Collinsworth has sat in either an NBC or FOX booth trying to do what we’ve tried to do — figure out mostly unintended, senseless replay rules, which change by the week, often reverse right to wrong and otherwise make a mess of games.

Sunday, Collinsworth tried to apply the latest NFL explanations as to what constitutes a catch and/or a TD. He didn’t make the rules.

How was he to know that the NFL, without alerting the public, would suddenly apply common sense — what looked like a catch and a TD stood as a catch and a TD? Such had become a matter of “maybe” all season! Or was this the first Super Bowl to include a coin toss

during the game? Collinsworth tried to apply the convoluted rules as had been explained by the NFL. What was ruled a catch and/or a TD often became neither. Recall Steeler TE Jesse James’ reversed TD catch versus the Pats, or two inane TD reversals against the Jets’ Austin Seferian-Jenkins?

Collinsworth should be saluted, not savaged, for the courage and conviction — and his stated frustration — to shine a Super Bowl light on preposterous rules that so clearly and radically changed from every prior game he called this season.

I’m in complete accord with Philly’s postgame rioters. Every time my team wins a big game I’m overwhelmed by a powerful urge to run downtown and set some fires. Roger Goodell would explain this as “spontaneous fun.”

To save time, the Yankees should place the bullpens directly behind the backstop. No one sits there, anyway.

When the stock market takes a big hit, experts explain it as “a correction.” So why, when it shoots up, is that never explained as “incorrect”?