You may have come across the excellent Logical Fallacy Ref gallery in your other perusals of the internet already, but if you haven’t, these could be handy if you run into a terrible football argument elsewhere. Using Ed Hochuli as the meme prop is excellent not only for his popularity, but appropriate for his other profession as an attorney.
I actually do have have a more serious comment about officiating below the fold, but there’s also one of those images in the galleries that took me down (a rough) memory lane.
Holy cow, there’s a Tim Crowder sighting! However, I can’t say that’s a great memory, since he’s half of one of the worse drafts (2007) the Broncos had under Mike Shanahan. That was the year he selected two defensive ends, Jarvis Moss and Crowder, with his first two picks. Not only did both of them bust, but each of them had a college teammate, at the same position (Ray McDonald and Brian Robison), that went on to have long NFL careers. That is textbook terrible scouting. But hey, at least they have Ryan Harris back!
Moving on to the more substantial news, Mike Pereira (who I believe to be far and away the best rules expert in the media) came back to Twitter after his traditional offseason absence, and he let his followers know that what has been known as the “Calvin Johnson rule” (or Dez Bryant rule if you’re a Cowboys fan) has been rewritten:
A player is considered to be going to the ground if he does not remain upright long enough to demonstrate that he is clearly a runner. If a player goes to the ground in the act of catching a pass (with or without contact by an opponent), he must maintain control of the ball until after his initial contact with the ground, whether in the field of play or the end zone. If he loses control of the ball and the ball touches the ground before he regains control, the pass is incomplete. If he regains control prior to the ball touching the ground, the pass is complete.
I rewatched the Bryant play several times, and my main takeaway is that I doubt that this rewriting is going to clear things up in the eyes of fans. But Pereira still maintains that overturning the call was correct, and he’s built up enough credibility in my eyes to trust him on close calls like this. We can only hope that such misfortune does not fall upon Demaryius Thomas or Emmanuel Sanders.
(Here’s a brief Twitter citation for Pereira)
Dez Bryant play..rule rewritten. New word like "initial" contact with ground. Football move is gone. Bottom line its clearly incomplete
— Mike Pereira (@MikePereira) July 23, 2015