Ok so everyone was looking into him being in bounds...but what about the ball hitting the ground after it went over his head? Maybe I need to be clarified on the rule but the ball hit the ground which I would think means you did not maintain possession throughout the entirety of the catch. Any clarification on this?
1) The ball touching the ground does not invalidate a catch. If the receiver maintains control and the ground does not assist in the catch, it's good. Byrd had control, flipped it back over his head, and then there was a little wiggle when it touched the ground. It's a close call. What I don't agree with is the overruling. I don't see where it is sufficiently clear the on-field call was wrong. Very borderline. The interpretation may have been that the wiggle did not matter because he had already gone to the ground with possession and the "follow through" wiggle was after the fact. That would be a debatable proposition and not obvious enough to support an overruling. Maybe the league figured they owned Cam for letting him get the holy hell beat out of him in last season's early games without throwing flags.
2) The Jesse James call was easy within the wording of the rules and officiating practice. No catch. It fits right in with the "landmark" Megatron and Bryant no catch calls and many such calls since.
3) The Allison fumble could have gone either way. I've seen similar plays called incomplete for lack of a definitive "football move". It's a bang bang call and too close to overrule.
I don't really have much problem with any of the three final outcomes within the context of the rules and officiating practice.
I do have a big problem with the rules themselves.
Until the Megatron call, general practice was 2 feet down (or an elbow, knee or butt) with control was a catch.
The "football move" concept (though they eliminated that phrase from the rules while retaining the concept) doesn't even make any sense on sideline, backline or end zone catches. There's no football move to be made. In the MIN game earlier this year Thielen caught a short out at the sidelines, tapped down two feet and then immediately had it swatted out of his hands before he finished one step out of bounds. Had that been in the field of play it would have been ruled "no catch" for lack of that football move. But the rules don't make that distinction, even if the receiver can't make a football move once out of the field of play. The whole thing is half-conceived.
My old school interpretation of what constitutes a catch would be easy to deal with in replay where they can break it down to 100ths. of a second. All you have to do is see the ball in the guys hands without any ball movement, and then confirm no movement as soon as he moves his hands. Done. Under this interpretation, all 3 are catches with Allison fumbling.
The problem the NFL has is the human eye/brain cannot process fast enough in real time to make those calls and the NFL wants the calls made on the field. So they jiggered the rules to conform to the human limitation of processing in about 1/20 th. of a second frames. Great. And then everybody looks at the James catch and says, "I know the rules, and the rules say "no catch", but that sure looks like he caught the ball."
What they should do is implement the rule as I described it, the way it was handled for decades, but give the coaches an extra challenge specifically for a catch-no catch situation. Since most challenges are used on these types of plays along with fumble-no fumble few would ever get by without due attention.
The NFL would absolutely not take up this suggestion for consideration because it would be an admission they have been looking at this thing incorrectly for years now.
