End of the First Quarter: 25 NFL officiating stories, Part 5

What is a catch?

The catch process started to get new life when Raiders receiver Louis Murphy was denied a touchdown in an opening night Monday Night Football game in 2009. The rules of the catch had been tightened up to suit replay reviews, and began to frustrate players and fans. It hit a new level when Calvin Johnson had a Lions game-winning touchdown reversed in the first game of the 2010 season.

And it just got worse and worse.

The logical trade-off that the Competition Committee made was that of the few controversial calls there were in a season, there would be many more controversial fumbles. While the catch process had included control plus two feet down plus an element of time in the rules since 1938, there were various ways in which that last step was expressed in the rules. Variations of maintaining control long enough “to perform an act common to the game” or “to perform a football move” were used, and were sufficient for most catches in any given season. However, the Competition Committee’s trade-off was tipping with more passes being ruled incomplete than casual fans would tolerate.

A player going to the ground proved to be tricky, because if the catch process is completed, and the receiver immediately slams into the ground, did he actually have the ball long enough? Is falling an act common/football move? In the end, it wound up stretching the time element, and in 2017 the catch process was simplified.

It was not as simple as removing a few words, because interpretations still had to be established to ensure consistency. A player who is falling to the ground still has to maintain possession into the ground, but the receiver does have opportunities to perform an act common to the game in between. The simplification wound up returning an official’s football sense to determining a catch, which might actually create an inconclusive call in replay. While there will still be controversy, the rule change has brought more common sense to the catch process.

Improvement plans bookend the First Quarter of the century

Over the years, different management styles by officiating leadership can lead to mixed results. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue felt there was a need to address some gaps that were starting to show in the late 1990s. It had been a few years after the venerable Art McNally had retired as the head of officiating.

Tagliabue said, “At some point after Art’s retirement, some of us felt that this critical balance of individual accountability and crew collaboration had deteriorated.”

The solution was to create an Officiating 2000 panel, which Tagliabue described as “a special working group of former coaches and officials to review NFL officiating.” This group included retired coaches Don Shula and Chuck Noll, along with retired referee Jim Tunney and others.

“After deep reviews and deliberation, the group concluded that Art’s emphasis on accountability and teamwork was critical and had to be recaptured,” Tagliabue said.

Fast forward to 2024. The officiating department was reorganized under an Officiating Improvement Plan, which included the Ramon George leaving the field and Mark Butterworth leaving the replay booth for vice president roles in the league office.

“As part of our ongoing Officiating Improvement Plan, we have added these veteran officials who understand the game from the field up and what it takes to improve and sustain officiating long-term as a center of excellence,” said senior vice president of officiating Perry Fewell. “When we improve training and development, we aim for better consistency, game efficiency, accuracy, accountability, and communication across all levels of game administration.”

Evolution of game film to digital

The idea of using game film to review officiating mechanics was new in the 1970s, and it involved NFL Films shipping reels of significant plays to the officials’ hotels and projecting on bedsheets with rented projectors the Saturday before the next game. It was a clumsy process, but it helped officiating advance beyond everyone’s individual preferences for mechanics and rules interpretations.

Film reels and VHS tapes were phased out at the dawn of the millennium and distribution on DVD — yeah, like the O.G. Netflix — improved the quality of instruction. Referees would even take thumb drives to the television truck so that they could review the entire game before their flight home touched down. Now, physical media is no longer necessary, and more angles — thanks to the all-22, the all-29 (including officials), and every TV angle pulled into the HawkEye replay system — of every play are instantly available to every official.

Technology has provided so many tools to the officiating profession. If you think social media parses down every detail, wait until you see what officials look at. In any run-of-the-mill play, there are approximately two dozen elements to check, more if there is anything that warrants a closer look. Multiply that by the 150-ish plays per game and by the 272 regular season, and there are over 1 million quality checks of every second of an NFL game. But, do tell us how you thought on that one play that the receiver’s foot was really out of bounds.

Services like Hudl emerged to help coaches with their film study and for high school players to showcase themselves for college recruiters. Guess who else uses it? Officials looking to level up.

Digital video is now pervasive at all levels as a means of self-assessment, as a teaching tool, and as an evaluation tool for officials. So the pissed off parent who is yelling because they didn’t think Junior fumbled the ball is nothing, because their assignor is going to be reviewing tape and making decisions on which officials earn playoff assignments.

Bottlegate

When replay was reintroduced after a seven-year hiatus, it appeared that it was here to stay. But at the conclusion of a Week 14 game in 2001, it faced its biggest controversy at the time, and still today remains the most controversial and cataclysmic incident involving instant replay.

Cleveland was trailing Jacksonville 15-10 late in the game, but were driving for a game-winning touchdown. Browns quarterback Tim Couch attempted a fourth-down pass to Quincy Morgan, and it was ruled complete on the field for a first down. The Browns hurried up to the line and Couch quickly snapped and spiked the ball.

After the spike, referee Terry McAulay, in his first season at the referee position, got on the microphone and said that the replay official had signaled for a review through his electronic pager prior to the snap of the spike play. McAulay reviewed the play and announced that the Morgan catch was incomplete and that the Jaguars would take over on downs.

Browns fans went into an uproar and began throwing plastic bottles onto the field in protest. Due to the unsafe conditions, McAulay decided to end the game with 48 seconds left on the clock. Eventually, commissioner Paul Tagliabue ordered the game be completed, which wound up being a couple of kneel-down plays in a near-empty stadium.

In his book After Further Review, Mike Pereira said that he downgraded McAulay for attempting to terminate the game early, but not for the review the play, since there was no proof when the replay signal came. Future commissioner Roger Goodell, then the executive vice president, insisted that McAulay be suspended, but in the end Pereira issued a warning letter to McAulay.

Impacts from the game are still felt today. Most stadiums no longer sell beer in bottles, and have a two-per-person limit during the game. Thank the Cleveland faithful on that day for those changes. With respect to replay, the league office persevered, defended the officiating crew, and over 20 years later, replay is still integral to the game. Wireless headsets replaced the pager system. While it has undergone many changes since the night of a thousand bottles, it remains a critical tool to keep officiating in the current age.

Social media’s rise and the birth of Football Zebras

Officiating has been under increased scrutiny year after year, but it was in the early 2000s when everything started to amplify.

In 1999, the replay system returned to the NFL after the 1986-1991 system proved to be ineffective. The second generation system introduced the concept of a coach’s challenge. As the image resolution improved in the transition to digital television, what was once called “a game of inches” now became a game of pixels.

Social media started to take hold in the late aughts/early teens. Calls from out-of-market games were now shared on platforms such as Twitter, increasing the exposure of a call in a local game as if it was in primetime.

Ben Austro founded Football Zebras in 2009 after searching for information about a particular call in a game yielded no nonpartisan results. Officiating had its first beat writer.

Had comedian George Carlin lived long enough, he probably would have noted the term social media to be oxymoronic, just as civil war. While officiating has struggled in some years, the digital record incorrectly paints an absurd amount of incompetence and algorithms amplify unfounded conspiracy theories. The vitriol can reach levels to frustrate many officiating experts, and in fact the rules analysts at the networks either shut down or dialed back their online engagement, and the league stopped contributing to @NFLOfficiating on X. Your humble scribe even finds some situations are just not worth the trouble to engage in “social” conversation.

Now everyone is an “expert.”