What is a catch? It's becoming eminently clear no one has a clue.
On a weekly basis we as a nation deal with a mind-wrenching torture wheel trying to decipher whether a man snagged an oblong pigskin from mid air and completed an amorphous set of requirements to deem it "a catch."
Spectators aren't the only ones who want the muddled rules simplified and fixed. Coaches are clamoring too.
"I wish we would just use (football) sense," Seahawks coach Pete Carroll told 710 ESPN radio this week. "You look at it -- did the guy catch it? Yeah, he caught it. OK, now the ball is out. That's what happened. The guy caught the football on our one play."
The instigator for Carroll's current huff was an apparent catch-and-fumble by Cardinals tight end Darren Fells on Sunday night that was ruled incomplete and not overturned upon review. You can hear Dean Blandino's explanation of why it wasn't overturned here.
For coaches like Carroll -- and many of the rest of us -- the rule needs to be torn up and simplified. The wrongheaded belief that we need to micromanage every step in order to avoid more fumbles -- which is all the current rule seems to be in place to do -- is ludicrous.
"Forget the steps or whatever you want to count and all that -- he caught the ball and then he turned and then the ball came out," Carroll said of Sunday's play. "Did he catch it? Yeah. Is the ball out? Yeah. I wish we would use that sense, but we're trying to make it so defined that you get stuck with the definition of it. 'Is it two full steps and then he looks like he was doing the football move' and all that, all those things. Did he catch the ball?"
It's a question that really shouldn't be so difficult to answer.
