Detroit Lions: The NFL has fixed the catch rule eight years late

Almost a decade later the Detroit Lions can breathe easily. The NFL has finally fixed the catch rule. We might be able to tell what a catch is this season.

The NFL has altered the Calvin Johnson rule. Finally, after enough teams got hosed, the rule stating that a player needed to perform an interpretive dance depicting the birth to death cycle of their favorite animal with the ball in their hands before setting it on the ground or making an effort to put it across the plane of the goalline is dead.

There was a time that us elderly fans recall when the NFL’s catch rule was a simple and elegant, possession plus two feet down equals a catch. What if the player drops it after that? It was a fumble. What if the player put it across the goalline? It was a touchdown. Whatever other question you could ask, the answer was dependent on one easily observable and reasonably objective question: did he get two feet down after he had possession of the ball?

Of course, then people started asking harder questions. What precisely constitutes possession? Well, that was a judgment call by the Referee. What about if the player is falling down and the ground knocks the ball out of his hands after his two feet were down? Well, the ground can’t cause a fumble so if he had possession first, it was a catch and then he was down. Words like “football move” and “completing the process” were added to the simple and elegant rule.

Calvin Johnson’s week one 2010 spectacular touchdown was the first to make people really question the new rules. But it was largely ignored as something that wasn’t likely to come up very often. But then it happened to the Dez Bryant and the Cowboys in the playoffs and people began to wonder. This extra level of complexity began drastically altering games. That, however, is because it did not play well with another completely unrelated rule.

In 2011 the NFL started reviewing every scoring play. The mantra was that people did not care if it slowed the game down a little bit. They just wanted the call made correctly in the end. Previously, the opposing team had at least needed to have an available challenge, or the play needed to occur in the final two minutes of a half. Now touchdowns came off the board at a much higher rate. The uproar one or two times a year that a team had a bad call against them exposed the catch rule in all its glory. the result was a cavalcade of incidents that left everyone involved confused.

The NFL moves with glacier-like rapidity and often errs on the side of making things more complex rather than less. Last season Chris Collinsworth, NFL Sunday Night Football color man, and former NFL wide receiver remarked on air that at this point even he did not know what a catch was anymore. NFL fans had been making that complaint for eight seasons at that point.

The new catch rule is much simpler according to Kevin Patra of NFL.com. It requires the following factors to be true in order for a catch to be complete:

Possession of the ball

Two feet or any other body part down

A football move such as:

A third step

Reaching or extending for the line to gain

The ability to perform such an act

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The new rule is not perfect, but it is less awful. I can imagine we will see people arguing over what constitutes “the ability to perform such an act” heatedly. We can only hope that in their effort to “fix” the “broken” pass interference penalty the NFL errs on the side of making it less complex. They seem to be headed down the path of creating another maelstrom like the Calvin Johnson rule.