Jump to content
  • Welcome!

    Register and log in easily with Twitter or Google accounts!

    Or simply create a new Huddle account. 

    Members receive fewer ads , access our dark theme, and the ability to join the discussion!

     

Blandino: If it's questionable, it's incomplete (let replay fix it)


Mr. Scot

Recommended Posts

We should probably get ready for a lot of anger this season.

League tells officials to err on the side of incomplete

“When it’s bang-bang, rule it incomplete,” Blandino told the league’s 124 game officials at an annual preseason clinic in Dallas, via Kevin Seifert of ESPN.com. “When in doubt, make it incomplete.”

Blandino’s advice to err on the side of calling a pass incomplete flows from his confidence that the ruling can be fixed via replay review, if there’s indisputable visual evidence that the player actually had the ball long enough.

f we look at it on replay and it did appear the receiver had it long enough, then we change it and move on,” Blandino said. “Don’t change how you’re officiating these plays. Bang-bang is incomplete, and the time element allows us to be consistent on these bang-bang plays.”

So maybe there’s a way to harmonize this. Maybe a true bang-bang play should be called incomplete, if the player loses the ball immediately after the second foot comes down. And maybe that handful of plays every year involving players getting two feet down (and maybe a third, e.g., #DezCaughtIt) while going to the ground but not keeping control of the ball — plays in which the expectations of players, owners, coaches, fans, and media conflict with the ruling on the field and in the replay booth — will now result in a decision that the ball was caught, with the replay standard (if applied correctly) unable to overturn the ruling.

Or maybe not.

“There are going to be four or five plays like this every year where everybody says, ‘That’s got to be a catch. It looks like a catch,'” Blandino said. “On the playground, that’s a catch. In the school yard, that’s a catch. But it’s not under our rule, because he did not have the ball long enough to be a runner before he got to the ground.”

So instead of giving the people what they want (and, in turn, setting the stage for more catches, yards, and touchdowns), the NFL will continue to defy the expectations of its stakeholders and customers. Which will set the stage for more controversy and criticism and scrutiny.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The big problem, of course, is that defaulting to "incomplete" automatically puts those they deem with insufficient proof to overturn the call at odds of being bad calls ............. again. What's that definition of insanity? Continuing to do the same thing over & over in hopes that the outcome will change. 

8 minutes ago, KillerKat said:

whatever happened to two feet down = catch? How did we evolve to this?

They changed the definition a couple of years ago to be something like: the receiver needs to become a runner (RB) after securing the ball to complete the catch. Which is a stupid way to put it. That's when all the trouble about completed catches began because a receiver can catch a ball & end up not moving from the spot where he caught it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

26 minutes ago, GRWatcher said:

The big problem, of course, is that defaulting to "incomplete" automatically puts those they deem with insufficient proof to overturn the call at odds of being bad calls ............. again. What's that definition of insanity? Continuing to do the same thing over & over in hopes that the outcome will change. 

They changed the definition a couple of years ago to be something like: the receiver needs to become a runner (RB) after securing the ball to complete the catch. Which is a stupid way to put it. That's when all the trouble about completed catches began because a receiver can catch a ball & end up not moving from the spot where he caught it.

why change it though?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.


  • PMH4OWPW7JD2TDGWZKTOYL2T3E.jpg

  • Topics

  • Posts

    • Give me Mitchell Evans over T Sanders in this run heavy offense any day of the week. 
    • What's up gents, the OGs remember me, the guy who single-handedly gave the Panthers the greatest uniform in history moniker. Not too long after that I got involved with Pro Football Focus (pre-Collinsworth acquisition) and ended up taking backseat here to preserve some objectivity. But from a distance I noticed a lot. After the end of the Cam era this place devolved into the most un-fun, petty, negative cesspool of whining and bitching that has ever graced the internet. The worst part of it all is that the level of discussion turned into the most ill-informed, hot-take, unnuanced crap, rife with people talking out of their posteriors as if they have any clue about what they are watching. Once you get into the professional side of the sport and actual film rooms, you start to understand there's an absurd number of moving parts to pretty much every snap and the details you are privy to are truly only half the picture. The absolute most important thing I learned from being part of professional level football analysis is that quarterbacking is literally the most intricate and difficult position in all of professional sports, and that the NFL itself is struggling to develop any workable model that allows them to understand what makes one succeed vs what makes one fail. Because of this paradox it has also made the quarterback position itself grossly overvalued from a fan and media standpoint, creating an absurd fixation on the results delivered by a single player who has to rely on the contributions of everyone around them. This also drives the dreaded inflation of QB salaries that inevitably cause even elite teams to lose key talent all to pour cash into the one player supposed to be able to single-handedly elevate the entire team (and defense and special teams and coaching and ownership by some mysterious proxy), yet without those same players even talented teams can wander the wilderness searching for the right guy to take advantage of their talent window. The discussions the last few years around Bryce has personified this insanity, as this board has devolved into some sort of electronic civil war between the hyperbolic Young supporters and the vitriolic Bryce haters. The reality, like practically everything in this world, is somewhere in the middle. He has traits that can absolutely elevate a team with creativity, play recognition, off-arm angle throws, mental toughness, etc. He's also physically limited, with mostly "good-enough" qualities for most situations that a professional quarterback is asked to do, and will never be an overpowering physical force like pre-injury Cam. But "good-enough" physicality represents a large majority of championship-winning quarterbacks, even in the modern era. There's a reason the corpse of Peyton Manning took the chip from elite physical specimen Cam, because the team surrounding him was talented enough to get him there, while we all know Cam was the driving force of that 2015 team. That's no knock on him, that's just how the game of football tends to work: the more complete team usually wins. The summary is this: if this team lives or dies solely on the performance of its quarterback, then it is absolutely a paper tiger even if he plays brilliantly week in and out. There are no superheroes in this sport, there are only conduits that proxy the collective efforts of much of the team around them. And no one alive can tell you how the position is played perfectly, it's all a confluence of circumstance and what unique collection of traits each player brings to the position, which can never be truly recreated season after season, even for the same player on the same team. If this place remains a raging hellscape of idiotic hot takes I will happily remove myself again and do something more productive for yet another decade, but maybe's there hope that we can all get back to the old adage, and keep pounding.
    • Really impressed how the bottom six have looked the past couple games
×
×
  • Create New...