Sometimes it's my solemn duty to deliver bad news. Today is one of those days. The NFL, I'm sorry to report, once again can't reliably tell us what a catch is. A slow-growing murmur entered the public view this week, just as the playoff race heated up and the most important games of the year grew visible on the horizon.
Your shock and surprise are excused. The NFL, after all, seemed to eliminate this problem in 2018 by rewriting the catch rule, replacing its requirement to control the ball "throughout the process of a catch" with a three-step definition that made plenty of sense. For most of the past three years, we have slept well, knowing that no matter what else happened on the field, a catch would be ruled a catch and an incompletion would be called an incompletion.
But close observers began noticing a shift away from the rulebook earlier this season, especially when catch/no-catch decisions went for replay review. And in Week 13, a competition committee member lobbed a subtle but public shot at the NFL's officiating department after one such decision. A few days later, a retired referee tweeted that the league's officiating executives "either don't know their own rule or are intentionally misapplying it."
Let's look at what happened and why it should be extrapolated into a much larger concern.