Report: NFL looking to relax requirement for ‘surviving the ground’ on catches

The NFL has openly acknowledged that it has a major problem with the rules currently in place to define a catch, and it appears there are going to be some significant changes on that front before the 2018 season.

According to ESPN’s Kevin Seifert, the NFL’s competition committee will discuss catch rules during the Scouting Combine in Indianapolis, and one of the goals it to relax the requirement on players having to “survive the ground.”

“The NFL competition committee appears to have unanimous agreement that controversial catch rulings involving Dez Bryant and Calvin Johnson should have been ruled complete, according to Giants owner John Mara,” Seifert wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “So the committee is working on changing the rule to relax the ‘going to the ground’ requirement.”

Basically, the best thing for the NFL to do would be to give on-field and replay officials the authority to use their judgment. Oftentimes the question of whether a player caught a pass comes down to the old “if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck” argument. As Seifert mentioned, one of those situations arose in 2015 when everyone could see that Dez Bryant completed the process of a catch in a playoff game and only lost control when he was diving for the end zone. The same argument could have been made with Steelers tight end Jesse James this past season, and an overturned call may have cost Pittsburgh a crucial game against the Patriots.

It’s almost as if the NFL needs a shorter definition for what constitutes a catch, and the competition committee appears to be working on that.