What an outstanding weekend of NFL football! On Saturday night, the Chiefs continued their winning ways and essentially locked up the AFC West. In Sunday’s early games, we had the Panthers getting their 10th win against the Packers with Aaron Rodgers back in action, not looking close to 100 percent. The Jaguars and Blake freaking Bortles dominated the Texans to earn their first playoff spot since 2007. The Eagles started slow, but realized they are still a great team. Nick Foles threw four touchdowns in their victory over the Giants.
In the late afternoon games, the legend of Jimmy Garoppolo continued to grow in San Francisco. Counting his two starts in New England last season, plus his three for the Niners, he’s 5-0.
We also saw the passing of the torch in the NFC West. The Rams easily dominated the Seahawksin Seattle, 42-7.
Then there was that wild ending in Pittsburgh that left the Steelers in shock and the Patriots on their way to the No. 1 seed in the AFC. To cap the night, a note card and a fumble for a touchback ended the game in Oakland, keeping the Cowboys alive in the NFC Wild Card race.
Unfortunately, the biggest story from this weekend was the NFL rule book.
In Pittsburgh, it looked like Steelers tight end Jessie James caught a game winning touchdown, only to have it reversed upon review. James caught the ball around the 1-yard line, landed on one knee, wasn’t touched and reached the ball across the goal line. In his attempt to reach over the goal line, James momentarily lost control of the ball as it hit the ground, therefore he didn’t finish the process of the catch. The following play Ben Roethlisberger threw a game losing interception when the offense couldn’t decide whether or not to spike it, resulting in a terribly executed play.
The NFL catch rule is awful and needlessly complicates the game.
It gets even worse around the end zone. As applied, the referees made the correct call in Pittsburgh — a player must have full control of the ball through the entire process of the catch for it to count as a touchdown.
This rule is awful. The league got itself into trouble after deciding it needed a clearer definition of what is a catch. NFL has been around for almost a century, and for 90 of those years, we knew what a catch was. It’s easy to see. Player catches the ball, makes a move, and it’s a catch. The eye test, common sense, works here.
James caught the ball, made a football move, and scored. But the NFL is stuck now. If they admit this rule is too complicated and makes the game worse, the league looks awful. The Shield hates to admit its mistakes. However, this rule is making the game worse. I’m spending my time writing about it, you’re talking about it, instead of talking about what a fantastic ending we just witnessed. I hope this gets addressed in the offseason.
The WORST rule in football
For the nightcap, the Raiders lost the game when Derek Carr dove for the pylon and in the process lost control of the football. The ball went out of the end zone and ruled a touchback.
In the entire enormous rule book, this is easily the worst rule in football. It punishes the offense and rewards the defense for often doing nothing. There are multiple instances where the player on offense isn’t hit or the hit doesn’t affect the movement of the ball, and the defense gets rewarded with a touchback.
There are multiple solutions to fix this. However, we must keep in mind that an offensive player can fumble near the goal line without reaching out.
1. The ball comes back to the original line of scrimmage, but with a loss of down.
If it’s on fourth down, then it’s a turnover at the spot of the original play. A fumble is still not a good play, and therefore there needs to be some punishment for the offense, hence the loss of a down.
This scenario rewards the offense too much. If the defense does force the fumble, they don’t get rewarded for it at all.
2. The offense keeps the ball at the spot of the fumble.
This is how it’s handled in the field. However, the rules around the end zone are different because of the significance of that area on the field.
If you decide this is the best rule, it could backfire on the defense. What if an offensive player fumbles near the goal line, when he’s not reaching out and the ball bounces out of the end zone? I think everyone agrees this should be a touchback. So if this rule were to be enforced, it would have to be specific to a play when a player is reaching for the pylon or goal line.
This would leave too much room for interpretation and lead to disaster.
3. The defense gets the ball at the spot of the fumble.
This is my favorite option. It penalizes the offense, but doesn’t reward the defense as much. Seems to be the simple solution.
If there’s no chance for a catch, how can there be pass interference?
Since we are discussing rules, there’s one more I can’t stand — a quarterback under throws a receiver by 3-5 yards and gets a PI call because the wide receiver tries to run through the defensive back for the catch, when there’s no chance for a catch.
The defensive back is running to catch up the wide receiver and therefore can adjust to an under-thrown ball. I understand the receiver is supposed to be allowed to attempt to make a catch, but again, you’re rewarding the offense for a poorly thrown ball.
I don’t like the obvious solution either.
That would be using the college rule of 15 yards for a PI. I’m not a fan of this. Anytime a ball is thrown deep and the defensive back feels he’s beaten, he will just tackle the wide receiver and take the 15 yards. So yeah, I don’t like changing that. I’m sure what the best fix to this problem is, but it’s killing defenses.
Well, the best solution to this would be replay, but that opens up a whole new can of worms.
Those are three terrible rules we’ve seen play out time and again. They all need to be addressed. How would you fix them?
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