Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, a member of the Competition Committee, thinks the catch rule needs to be revisited after Sunday’s touchdown that became not a touchdown due to the latest application of the convoluted rule that requires players going to the ground to, as referee Tony Corrente explained it when announcing the reversal of the catch, “survive the ground.”
Will the current catch rule survive the offseason? Nearly three years ago, after the #DezCaughtIt moment in the playoffs, the league streamlined the language but didn’t change the rule, replacing the “act common to the game” formulation with the requirement that the receiver clearly become a runner.
So what will happen the next time the Competition Committee begins to tinker with the rule? The group arguably has avoided a complete overhaul due to concerns that an attempt to make it better will inadvertently make it worse. And so the league quite possibly will make a superficial change in order to create the impression that it has done something, even if it ultimately is doing nothing to the substance of the rule.
The bigger problem continues to be not necessarily the rule but the application of replay review to it. In early 2016, former senior V.P. of officiating Dean Blandino emphasized that, when the officials who are viewing the play in real time believe a catch has occurred, the very high bar of the replay standard should make it difficult to overturning the ruling on the field.
“He ruled that the player had the ball long enough to be a runner, and if it’s not clear and obvious that he was not a runner, then the call on the field must stand,” Blandino said regarding a decision not to overturn a catch made by Cardinals receiver Larry Fitzgerald in a playoff game, when he seemed to quickly go to the ground and lose possession. “Again, the basic premise of replay is that the call on field is presumed correct unless we have indisputable evidence that it’s incorrect. This was not indisputable, not definitive. There is a subjective element to this rule. . . . It was questionable. That’s why the call on the field stood.”
So, basically, a fix to the catch rule may not be needed. What may be needed is a fix to the application of the replay review standard to the catch rule.
Several times this year, the league office has failed to properly apply the replay standard, essentially replacing the judgment of the on-site officials with the judgment of current senior V.P. of officiating Al Riveron. With all due respect to Riveron, he’s proven on multiple occasions that he’s as not equipped to apply the standard properly as Blandino was.
Thus, perhaps instead of trying to fix the catch rule, the NFL should either bring back Blandino or find someone else who will correctly apply the 50-drunks-in-a-bar replay standard, overturning only those rulings that are clearly and obviously incorrect, without resorting to frame-by-frame hair splitting to second-guess the rulings made by the people who are in the best position to sense whether a catch is a catch.
Blandino made it clear in 2016 that, when it comes to the catch rule, squinting shouldn’t be needed. The ruling of a catch (which was made in Pittsburgh’s case) is either clearly wrong or it’s not. And it’s hard to read the above quote from Blandino without thinking that the ruling on the field was not clearly and obviously wrong.