The NFL catch rule, explained in three steps

For most of the 2010s the catch rule was football's running joke. Broadcasts cut to slow motion, former officials disagreed on air, and nobody in the stadium knew what they had just watched. The rule as it stands now is genuinely short.

The three elements

A player who catches a pass needs three things:

• 01Control of the ball.
• 02Two feet — or another body part — down in bounds.
• 03A football move: a third step, a reach for the line to gain, or the ability to perform such an act.

That is the whole test. Control, feet, move.

What got deleted in 2018

At the March 2018 owners meetings, NFL teams unanimously approved a simplified definition of a catch. The change that mattered was a subtraction: the going-to-the-ground element was eliminated.

"Surviving the ground" is no longer a separate test.

Under the old rule, a receiver who was falling had to maintain control all the way through contact with the ground, even after he had satisfied everything else. That is the clause that produced the era's most notorious overturns, because a ball that moved on impact could erase a catch that looked complete to everyone watching.

The three elements now apply whether a player is going to the ground or not. If a receiver had control, got his feet down, and made a football move, he caught it — and the ball moving when he lands does not undo it.

Why it still gets argued

The remaining friction is almost entirely in element three. Control and feet are close to binary; a football move is a judgment. Reaching the ball toward the line to gain is clear. A third step is clear. "The ability to perform such an act" is the phrase that keeps replay officials employed.

Which is the honest state of it: the rule is no longer complicated, but it is still subjective. Those are different complaints, and only one of them got fixed.