After further review – much further, we emphasize – the NFL's competition committee has decided that the catch Dez Bryant of Dallas appeared to make against Green Bay in a January 2015 playoff game was indeed a catch. Same with the touchdown grab Calvin Johnson apparently authored against Chicago on Sept. 12, 2010.
As New York Giants owner John Mara told ESPN's Kevin Seifert on Tuesday: "I think where we are unanimous (are) plays like the Dez Bryant play in Green Bay, going to the ground, (and) the Calvin Johnson play from a couple of years ago (sic). I think all of us agree that those should be completions."
This will doubtless please Johnson immensely, seeing as how he retired after the 2015 season.
We all know the NFL has issues. Ratings declined 9.7 percent for regular-season games in the season just past. This followed a dip of 8 percent in 2016. Some of this is because of younger consumers cutting the cable cord. Some could be a function of the mountain of evidence that indicates football is injurious to its players' health. Some can be traced to a backlash against the kneeling national-anthem protests. Some might have to do with the NFL's dwindling star power, especially vis-à-vis the NBA.
I’d suggest that there’s a more prosaic reason: The NFL game itself stopped making sense.
Click on YouTube. Watch the Dez Bryant play. Watch the Calvin Johnson one. They’re incredible feats by amazing athletes. Even though you know what’s coming, you still go, “Wow.” And even now, years after both were deemed incompletions, you think, “How in Sam Hill are those NOT catches?”
One of the best regular-season games of the 2017 season featured the Patriots against the Steelers. Pittsburgh tight end Jesse James appeared to have given his team the lead with 28 seconds remaining. Instead it was determined after replay review that James' grasp on the ball hadn't "survived the ground."
(Thus had the NFL brought another idiotic phrase into the vernacular. “Tuck rule,” meet “survive the ground.”)
Mara to Seifert: “The Jesse James play, I think should be a completion, but I'm not sure we're unanimous on that.”
On Super Bowl Sunday, we all expected two key Philadelphia catches to be overturned – because when are apparent catches upheld anymore? (My stock line, spoken in many press boxes over the past few years: Raymond Berry retired after the 1967 season with a then-NFL-record 631 catches; if they’d had replay back then, he might have retired with 331.)
On both Corey Clement's sort-of-juggling back-of-the-end-zone catch and Zach Ertz's eerily-similar-to-the-Jesse-James-play lunge for the goal line, NBC's Cris Collinsworth and Al Michaels guessed that the touchdowns wouldn't stand. The announcers were then lampooned because, miracle of miracles, both catches were allowed to stand – but I was likewise pretty sure those points would come off the board. Because the NFL has conditioned us not to believe our eyes or to trust rational thought. The NFL way: If it looks like a TD catch, it probably isn't.
This is so off-putting that the audience has to ask itself, “Why bother watching something that makes no sense?” Why can the ground not cause a fumble for a runner but “surviving the ground” is part and parcel of “completing the catch”? Why is it a touchdown if a lunging runner breaks the plane with the ball and immediately loses it but not a touchdown when a falling receiver does?
A week after the Jesse James robbery – sorry, couldn't resist – the Patriots were the beneficiaries of yet another overturned touchdown, this by Buffalo's Kelvin Benjamin. That prompted ESPN's Seifert, who tracks officiating like no other correspondent, to throw up his hands: "The discussion is over. There is nothing more to debate. Despite its denials, the NFL has unquestionably distorted its replay-review system in a way that is impacting the playoff race and could potentially threaten the direction of an actual postseason game."
We can only imagine the public outcry if the Patriots – the team that gave us SpyGate and DeflateGate – had profited from one or more reversals in the Super Bowl. I’m not a big conspiracy theorist, but there’s a part of me that wonders if someone from the NFL didn’t whisper into referee Gene Steratore’s earpiece, “That’s enough for them. Touchdown, Eagles!”
Then again, I’m also wondering: If Benjamin’s slightest-of-bobbles was enough to scrub a touchdown on Christmas Eve, why wasn’t Clement’s on Feb. 4?
Football rules shouldn't be that hard. There's no offside rule as nuanced as the one in soccer, which can involve "passive offside," which means "not offside." In American football, you either are or you're not. That's until the NFL started writing rules that defy logic. (Watch the Tuck Rule play again. Sixteen years later, does that still not look like a fumble? And what happens if the fumble stands and the Patriots lose in the division round? Do they stick with the fill-in Tom Brady the next season or go back to the recovered Drew Bledsoe?)
We should credit, I guess, the NFL for finally addressing the elephant in Roger Goodell’s parlor. But how much damage to the league’s credibility was done in the interim? How long did it take for someone to ask, “If we as an organization keep falling on our face, will we survive the ground?”
About the Author
