If You Hated the Old NFL 'Catch' Rule, You're Gonna Really Hate the New One
If ever there was an example of “be careful what you wish for,” this is it. Or will soon be.
Everybody hates the catch rule the way it’s been. Everyone’s got some example of something that should’ve been a catch but wasn’t, or was a catch but shouldn’t have been. Myself included. So we’ve screamed and yelled and tried to apply the old Supreme Court definition of pornography that goes “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” Well, right or wrong, the old rule had a definition. In the literal sense, in that the root word of “definition” is “definite.” And now that it’s been scrapped, you’re going to miss it once it’s gone, I promise you.
Say what you will about the now-extinct “survive the ground” provision. And I’ll concede that at times it wasn’t pretty. But at least it was definite. It took the interpretation out of it. If Dez Bryant or Calvin Johnson – just to name the two examples everyone remembers – wanted credit for the catch, they needed to hold onto the ball after it hit the ground. Period. Come up with the damned thing still in your hands. Both hands. Not moving. Not rolling onto the back of one hand. Secured. Hold it. Pick it up. Take it to the locker room. Out for a nice dinner afterward. Uber it home. Put it to bed.
Sure, it felt excessive at times. But it took all the guesswork and opinion out of it because the rule was written in black and white. And it’s been replaced by this vague, ambiguous, amorphous “or the ability to perform such an act” ragtime. Which not only sounds like it was taken from a discussion about human behavior between Data and Capt. Picard, it’s an abstraction that is going to result in ten times more controversies than “survive the ground” ever did.
So congratulations, everyone who demanded more sanity in interpreting a catch from a non-catch. You got your way. And as is almost always the case when the NFL tries to fix what isn’t broken just to play to the mob, it’s about to get way more insane up in here.