Catch as catch can, except with Goodell’s NFL rules
It is the most pressing problem staring the NFL in the face as Super Bowl LII awaits.
And for a $14 billion league struggling with concussions and player safety, national anthem protests and declining TV ratings, it’s become the billiondollar question. What is a catch? Like, seriously. What in the world constitutes a catch in pro football nowadays?
You’ve known the answer your entire life. At least you thought you did. Then the last decade appeared, forcing you to mentally bobble everything ev-
ery time a receiver hit the ground and the ball briefly bounced around.
I probably learned the incredibly complex and multi-layered rules governing a catch — “Did the player catch the ball? Yes? Then, that’s a catch.” — when I was 3, maybe 4. Almost 36 years later, I’m more confused than ever and I know I’m far from the only one.
Heck, even the King of the league has no idea what we’re seeing or talking about anymore.
“Clearly catch, no-catch has been a lot of discussion and a lot of disagreement,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said this week, during his annual chat with the Super Bowl media. “I think we can clarify this rule and I think we can do it with a lot of hard work (and) focus and get to a place where — I’m not going to tell you there won’t be controversy, but I believe we can get to a much better place.”
Replay part of problem A much better place. About a catch. In 2018. Wowzers. There’s no specific point in time when it became so bad there was no going back. If you’re older than me, you’ve been yelling at the TV for decades, and I’ve been shouting out the obvious at the screen since I was in my early teens.
But ever since the referees on the field began being controlled by the NFL overlords in a game-day operations headquarters in New York — it sounds like something out of a bad science fiction show, I know — pro football has lost its sight and senses.
Common sense: Out the window.
The over-analysis of everything: Increasingly in vogue in the NFL, while being hated more than ever by the paying masses.
Clear touchdowns are suddenly erased. Heroic midfield grabs disappear. Simple quarter-back-to-wide receiver connections become a crime scene, replayed over and over and over on your TV, as the game ceases and a couple of announcers dance around a question that no one has a consistent answer to anymore. What is a catch? “From our standpoint, I would like to start back, instead of adding to the rule, subtracting the rule,” Goodell said. “Start over again and look at the rule fundamentally from the start. Because I think when you add or subtract things you can still lead to confusion. These rules are very complex — you have to look at what the unintended consequences are of making a change, which is what the Competition Committee, in my view, does so well and with so much thought.”
At least the King is talking — that’s a start. But there’s nothing in NFL history or our understanding of football that says a catch — and answering questions about it — must be this complex.
Twisted language “Survive the ground.” I mean, what is that? Who speaks like that? How do you even “survive” the ground?
The Cowboys were wronged. The Steelers were tortured. The Lions haven’t recovered from Calvin Johnson’s TD (that was ruled a non-TD) — he retired and Detroit hasn’t been to a Super Bowl.
A smart prop bet: Will the NFL screw up the catch rule in Super Bowl LII?
“I do think that if it’s a catch in the backyard, in high school, in college and then all of a sudden you get to the NFL and it’s not a catch, there’s something that we have to look at there,” Texans coach Bill O’Brien said in December, sounding like a modern football genius.
The NFL is in the cross hairs. The league rakes in endless cash — Fox is paying $3.3 billion for the rights to televise the weekly snoozefest that is “Thursday Night Foot- ball” — but fan frustration is through the roof and it’s impossible to talk about pro football without complaining about it.
The games are too slow and long. The on-field quality has declined. The sport is brutal — but it’s also too easy for QBs to pass. Kids are choosing safer sporting options — even Justin Timberlake won’t let his child play.
Refs, flags and TV timeouts drag down a pro game that could learn a lot from college football.
And then there’s the big commish, setting up another Super Bowl by acknowledging that he, too, no longer knows what a catch is in pro football.
Figure that one out and then maybe the NFL can make some progress.