Positional distinctions are disappearing. Rushing yards are losing meaning. And offensive and defensive schemes are shifting from game to game — if not drive to drive. The most popular sport in America is changing faster than it ever has before — yet the way we talk about the game has largely stayed the same. It’s time for the conversation to catch up to the shifting concepts redefining front offices and gameplay nationwide. So welcome to The Ringer’s You Don’t Know Football Week, where we’ll explore and attempt to better understand the evolutions already occurring on the gridiron — and the reboots we’d like to see make their way to the game next.
On November 15, 2015, Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. caught a go-ahead touchdown pass in the final minutes of a Week 10 game against the Patriots. Or maybe he didn’t—New England cornerback Malcolm Butler knocked the ball to the ground just moments after Beckham had gained control of it. The result of a thrilling matchup between two of the league’s most popular teams came down to how the referees interpreted the rules regarding this play. Here is how CBS’s lead broadcasting crew of Jim Nantz and Phil Simms explained the situation to fans.
NANTZ: They rule it a touchdown for Beckham! But now they’ll talk about it.
(Six seconds of silence.)
NANTZ: [Patriots safety Patrick] Chung saying no way, but yes, they say way, touchdown.
SIMMS: He was not being contested … (Note: This does not describe the action of the play, and the word “contested” does not appear anywhere in the NFL rule book. Regardless, Simms does not finish his thought.)
(Ten seconds of silence.)
REFEREE ED HOCHULI: After the touchdown occurred … (Note: I do not know why Hochuli said anything at this point, nor do I have any idea what he was going to say if he had completed his sentence. But I like that he chimed in. It’s like a waiter coming over to read the specials to a couple in the midst of breaking up and then slowly backing away.)
(Three seconds of silence.)
NANTZ: This whole thing … We go on and on about what’s a catch, take it to the ground, the Dez Bryant play against Green Bay in the playoffs … (Note: For some reason, this snippet isn’t included in the YouTube clip, but it is on the original game broadcast. Anyway, Beckham was not going to the ground here, so the NFL’s rule that applies to receivers going to the ground has nothing to do with this ruling.)
(Eight seconds of silence.)
NANTZ: This going to be reviewed. This is going to demand that we bring in Mike Carey. (Note: Mike Carey was CBS’s former rules analyst, who could have theoretically provided clarity to a scenario that Nantz and Simms clearly did not understand.)
SIMMS: Oh, there’s contact … before he, he establishes maybe the catch on the ground. (Note: This means absolutely nothing.) We’ll see—well, we’ll see what Mike Carey says.
(Eight seconds of silence.)
NANTZ: Mike Carey, is that a touchdown?
CAREY: No, that was not a touchdown, and here’s why. In order to complete the catch, you have to have two feet clearly down with possession. Simultaneous with that second foot was the strip, the ball comes out, incomplete pass, and that’s what I would rule if I was on the field. (Note: Shortly after Carey says this, CBS rolls video that shows Beckham planting his second foot in the end zone with possession of the ball several frames before the strip, contrary to Carey’s assessment that the strip happened simultaneously with Beckham’s foot touching down.)
SIMMS: Very well said, Mike.
NANTZ: There was a lot of hesitation, Mike, on the field, too, as it happened, with the officials.
CAREY: It happened so quick. And you know, the passing game is complex. But when you slow it down, you see there is just not enough time with control after the second step. (Note: Carey is contradicting himself here. In his first sound bite, he said that players need only “two feet clearly down with possession.” Now he is talking about “time with control after the second step.”) The ball is out. This is incomplete. This is one we all can agree on, I think.
(Three seconds of silence.)
CAREY: One step, two steps, three. (Note: It is not clear why Carey counts to Beckham’s third step. There is no NFL rule requiring a runner to take a third step with the ball to complete a catch, and Carey had just explicitly said that only the first two steps mattered.) He had no time to become a runner, and it’s the same in the end zone as it is on the field of play.
NANTZ: All right, Hochuli has made his judgment.
Nantz did not attempt to cite any rules, merely saying that there was uncertainty about them in an effort to fill time before Carey began talking. Simms stammered nonsense the few times that he was called upon to speak. And it took Carey eons to reach the phrasing relevant to the situation: Beckham did not “become a runner” after his second step with the ball, which is what Hochuli and then–NFL rules czar Dean Blandino mentioned when justifying the final ruling that this pass was incomplete. But this was the last thing Carey thought to say. It took this trio of highly paid football commentators 124 seconds to hit upon the most important point in deciphering the play to fans.
To be fair, these were not the best football explainers. Simms is a doddering fool who struggles to drink tea and was replaced by Tony Romo on CBS’s lead broadcast team this April; Carey was not retained for CBS’s football coverage last season, in part because of his tendency to reach the exact opposite conclusion of the one that the league’s officials had reached. But these broadcasters were not alone in their confusion. On that same November day, a play in the Sunday Night Football matchup between the Cardinals and Seahawks led to this four-minute nonexplanation of what constitutes a catch by NBC’s Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth:
Without being able to turn to an officiating analyst, Michaels and Collinsworth didn’t try to analyze whether they thought the play should or shouldn’t be ruled a catch. In fact, they didn’t even pretend to understand the rules. Instead, they used the moment as a soapbox to highlight the leaguewide controversy surrounding the type of situation unfolding in front of them. “Nobody knows what the rules are,” Collinsworth said. “There’s no definitive rule that says you get two feet down, or whatever it is. Something definitive has to come out this offseason about what is a catch and what is not a catch.” It did not.
Entering the 2017 season, the most well-known aspect of the catch rule is that nobody knows what a catch is. Here are stories from CBS, SB Nation Sports on Earth, The Washington Post, BroBible, and The Daily Caller that contain the phrase “nobody” (or “no one”) “knows what a catch is” in the headline. After Pats receiver Julian Edelman made the play of the season in Super Bowl LI, he admitted multiple times that he was unclear about the rule and wasn’t sure whether his perfectly legal play was afoul of the law. He is a professional pass catcher, and he doesn’t know the most fundamental pass-catching rule.
I’m going to try to explain the catch rule, just in case you are one of the many who doesn’t understand it. (Welcome, Phil Simms.) Then I’d like to spell out how that rule came to be—and why the NFL won’t establish a sensible alternative until it changes its mind-set.
Here is the rule defining a catch from the National Federation of State High School Associations’ football rule book from 2014:
A catch is the act of establishing player possession of a live ball which is in flight, and first contacting the ground inbounds while maintaining possession of the ball or having the forward progress of the player stopped while the opponent is carrying the player who is in possession and inbounds.
That’s one sentence and 51 words—21 of which are devoted to the relatively uncommon scenario of a player catching the ball in midair and being carried by an opponent.
The NFL rule book section defining a catch contains 649 words with three lettered subsections, six numbered items, and two notes. Just because something is long doesn’t mean it is good—remember the Buccaneers’ longform story on the first 100 days of Lovie Smith’s tenure?—and the NFL’s rule is unnecessarily convoluted.
First, let’s touch on the three lettered subsections, which present the conditions that must be satisfied for a play to be ruled a catch. These amount to: control the ball while it’s in the air, get both feet (or another part of your body) inbounds, and “become a runner.” (This is where things start to go off the rails.)
Then come the six numbered items, each of which details a separate scenario that slightly alters the conditions necessary for a completed catch. For example, Item 6 explains what the second half of the high school rule does—that if a receiver controls a ball midair and is carried out of bounds by another player, the receiver doesn’t need to get his feet down inbounds, nor does he need to maintain control upon hitting the ground.
Of these items, the one that has caused the most leaguewide consternation is Item 1, about a “player going to the ground.” If a player in the act of catching the ball is falling down or tackled before he “become[s] a runner,” the lettered item about “becoming a runner” is rendered irrelevant and the new standard for a catch becomes whether the player maintains control after his initial contact with the ground. On the famous Dez Bryant play in the divisional-round playoff game between the Cowboys and Packers, many fans counted how many steps the Dallas star took as he fell to the ground. If Bryant were not going to the ground, his third step would have made him “a runner,” but because he started “going to the ground” before he “became a runner,” his third step was meaningless. All that mattered was whether he held onto the ball when he hit the ground, which he did not.
While it might sound impossible to keep track of multiple contradictory rules that define the same thing under differing circumstances, that sort of situation happens in football all the time. (If a quarterback throws the ball and it hits the ground, the pass is ruled incomplete, unless the pass traveled backward and unless the quarterback’s arm was hit by a defender before it began moving forward. There are always unlesses.) The catch rule boggles our minds not because it attempts to explain every possible catch-related scenario, but because it does so with broad, awkward wording that is tough to interpret, often fails to make sense from a gameplay standpoint, and, despite its intricacies, still asks officials to make a judgment call as to when a player achieves the mystifying distinction of “becoming a runner.”
The NFL rule book says that a player becomes a runner when he “is capable of avoiding or warding off impending contact of an opponent, tucking the ball away, turning upfield, or taking additional steps.” Not when a player does any of those tasks, mind you—when a player “is capable” of doing them. The league’s catch rule relies on officials to watch a super slow-motion replay and calculate the precise moment when a physical activity was possible.
And why is “becoming a runner” even our standard in the first place? Why did we pick a phrase that doesn’t mean anything, and that doesn’t even make sense in many football scenarios? When Beckham caught the ball, he was already in the end zone. Normally, a player in possession of a ball in the end zone has scored points, and the play is dead.
Why should a player have to become a runner when he doesn’t need to run?
It is surprisingly easy to track how we got here. And the NFL’s catch rule was not always perversely complicated. Here is the relevant portion from the NFL’s 1978 digest of rules:
In another section, the digest clarifies that “possession” refers to “when a player holds the ball long enough to give him control to perform an act common to the game”—what eventually came to be known as “a football move”—which is ambiguous. But still: It’s short and simple. The standards are slightly different from the modern high school rule, but the gist is identical.
This definition of a catch is loose, which was OK in 1978 because cameras were garbage. This is actual footage of a field goal attempt from a Packers-Eagles game in December 1978. The league could tolerate giving referees complete authority over what a catch was, since their eyes were as good a resource as any.
But cameras got better. The NFL introduced its current replay system in 1999, and sure enough, that season brought the league’s first bona fide catch controversy. In the final minute of the NFC championship game between the Rams and Buccaneers, Tampa Bay wide receiver Bert Emanuel made a play that everybody seemed to agree was a catch. The rule book apparently disagreed:
The tip of the ball touched the ground while Emanuel hauled in his diving grab, and although he maintained complete control of the ball for the entire sequence, the rules at the time expressed that any ball that touched the ground at any point during a player’s catch attempt should be deemed incomplete. Before replay, everybody would have moved on with their lives: It was clear that Emanuel’s play was, in spirit, a catch. But with a frame-by-frame video review revealing that the ball momentarily grazed the turf, the rules had to be upheld. The Buccaneers lost 11-6; the Rams went on to win the Super Bowl; Rams linebacker Mike Jones became the most famous Mike Jones in the world for, oh, three years; and in the offseason the following note was added to the rule book: “It is a catch if in the process of attempting to catch the ball, a player secures control of the ball prior to the ball touching the ground and that control is maintained after the ball has touched the ground.”
In 2004, the NFL’s catch rule was still slim. In 2007, the rules on player possession and catches looked like this:
In 2008, those rules were expanded massively to clarify what happens when a player hits the ground:
But Rule 8—the one discussed earlier—still looked like this:
Here is the catch section in the 2010 rule book, in all its bloated glory:
Evidently, those changes were made in the 2009 rule book. In Week 1 of the 2009 season, Louis Murphy caught this pass for a touchdown, and people began to explain the “going to the ground” distinction. In 2010, the Calvin Johnson play happened:
The NFL has now spent two decades adding to and updating the catch rule. In 2015, the long-standing “football move” wording was replaced by the “become a runner” terminology, and commissioner Roger Goodell created a catch committee. In 2016, the definition of when a player “becomes a runner” was slightly changed. (No changes have been made for the 2017 season.)
The problem is that our understanding of a catch has long been “we know it when we see it.” Players need to get two feet down, and then they have to do … something. For decades, referees had leeway to subjectively determine that something. But football is a game of strict definitions, which is why the people who wrote the rule book saw the ball the game is played with and concocted the phrase “it shall have the form of a prolate spheroid.” The current catch rules are the result of the league trying to reverse-engineer logic that matches our preexisting understanding of a catch. “Football move” and “become a runner” are both attempts to define “two feet down and something.” Neither truly does.
The league could create an objective rule. It could decide that making a catch is dependent on a player getting two feet inbounds, and nothing else, or taking three steps with the football, and nothing else. But doing so would alter the carefully crafted calculus of the game we’ve come to understand. If getting two feet down with control of the ball alone constituted a catch, there would be a marked increase in catches turned into fumbles, making life harder on NFL offenses. If receivers had to take three steps while controlling the football, the rule book would lead to a spike in incompletions and create inconsistencies on plays near the sideline. If the league eliminated the “going to the ground” phrasing, a player could slam the ball into the ground after getting [X number of feet] down, lose control, and still record a catch. I don’t think any of those scenarios would ruin football. The new reality would take some getting used to, but we’d adjust.
I don’t think we’ll ever adjust to uncertainty, though. And that’s what the current rule created.
The league can either create an objective rule that will be ruled correctly all the time with complete understanding, or it can maintain the “two feet down and something” standard developed in a time before frame-by-frame video scrutiny existed. It cannot do both. As long as the NFL tries to fit our existing, collectively understood perception of what a catch is within strictly defined rules, its attempts will be ruled incomplete.