Quote:
Originally Posted by ajmc
You CANNOT dig yourself out of a hole, by digging downward. The existing rules determining "a catch" weren't absolutely perfect, but served really well for a long time.
Has this adjustment clarified anything, improved, or clarified, everyone's understanding and acceptance of what's necessary? If you scratch the smallest, most benign blemish, long enough or hard enough intending to remove it, you can make it bleed or infected.
Sometimes the most sensible way to eliminate a hole, is simply to put all the dirt back in, and accept it's a potential, but rarely problematic, hole.
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I agree with all this...I think. There's no way to get away from the factual judgment of whether a player has a good enough grip on the ball (and the requisite body parts on the ground in bounds). You can put in various extra criteria in certain cases in an attempt to get rid of that judgment, but all you'll succeed in doing is transferring part or all of the judgment of one factual cirumstance to another, and complicating the whole procedure.
Some players falling while catching or recovering a ball hit the ground and lost it or caused it to touch the ground. In some cases the officials ruled that possession preceded the ball's popping out or the player's hitting the ground, and in other cases that there had been no possession, and they may have been correct or incorrect in either case. Other people looking at the same play frequently would disagree with their judgment, as is part and parcel of such determinations. But it looked like seeing whether the ball subsequently hit the ground or came loose might've been a good proxy in some cases for whether the player's grasp was good enough (so good that some people in this thread would use it as a way to rule in cases in Fed or NCAA), and in some cases easier to see, so the NFL adopted a provision holding the judgment of possession in abeyance until that determination could be made. But that turns out not to be an easier thing to see in many cases. The judgment has merely been shifted to a question of whether the player was "going to the ground" during the catch, or a catch occurred before the player started "going to the ground". Not to mention cases wherein under the new rule a player rolls over on the ball as part of a motion to the ground with the ball in hands, and you'd theoretically have to see whether the ball touched the ground while you're screened from seeing it by that player's body.
BTW, the previous wording as part of possession, "[enough] to perform any act common to the game", I had to laugh at. NCAA got rid of that language long ago because they realized it didn't make any judgment easier, while NFL kept it.