OT: Anyone see that 'interception' by the Ravens?
- Thread starter supermatt24
- Start date
psu_83_drummer
Well-Known Member
Looks to me like AB caught the ball, took 2-3 steps with possession, right knee goes down and ball pops out. How that is an interception is beyond comprehension.
Goes to the idea of completing the catch when going to the ground. The dispute here would be your 2-3 steps in possession. If that were so, then yes, down by contact. If not the steps/'football move' in possession, he must maintain control through the act of going to the ground. If that doesn't happen, it becomes a question of did the ball hit the ground. Here it did not thus interception. Had ball hit ground would have been incomplete.
It is one thing when the receiver is catching the ball without contact with a defender and the situation in the Steeler game where Brown was not only in continuation of the catch, but also being tackled and driven into the ground after at least a step. The current rules probably do nullify the catch, but boy looking at that one, it sure looked like it should have been downed and not a fumble. Probably another situation where they need another definition of a catch.
I hear you, and I think this sequence of events falls into a case that the rule-book doesn't really consider.
With that said, before the review, the official said the AB was not down by contact, but rather because his forward progress was stopped.
So, some questions:
1. If the play is whistled/called dead because forward progress was stopped, is the "maintain possession through the catch" BS still come into play?
2. Can there be a change of possession AFTER a play is whistled/called dead because forward progress was stopped? If so, that would be a new one for me.
3. Back to the "maintain possession through the catch" BS... I thought that in the cases where the "maintain possession through the catch" comes into play in a "down by contact" scenario, the play is dead (because the player was down by contact with control of the ball at the instant he was down by contact) -- And the only question is whether or not it's a completed pass, or incomplete.
The idea that the opposing team can "intercept" the ball -- or gain possession in any way -- after a play was legally dead/over is beyond strange to me. I really doubt that was their intention, but I suspect they never considered this scenario and therefore the call is based on some on-the-fly interpretation and guesswork.
Do you think if the person who ended up with the ball ("intercepted") were a Steeler (another player on the offense), he could have advanced it? There's no way. The call would have been, correctly IMO, that the play was over one way or another when the receiver was down by contact with possession of the ball.
Rightly or wrongly, the officials ruled the play dead (blew the whistle) when AB hit the ground, so regardless, no advancement of the ball was going to be allowed.
But yeah, there was so much about that whole sequence that didn't make sense.
I'll bet that if that play would have been a factor in the outcome of the game, it would be getting a lot more analysis. In a way, it's unfortunate that it didn't, because I think there are a lot of interesting questions about how that play should have been ruled.
As I said in my post above, I'm still the most confused about how, before the review, the official said the play was dead as a result of forward progress being stopped -- But then they ruled that a legal interception occurred ... AFTER the play was whistled dead because forward progress was stopped??
That changes everything about what I thought I knew about the end of a play.
It's basically the same as a fumble that's recovered by the other team right after a whistle blows. If there is a "clear and immediate" recovery (or in this instance, interception), that action is allowed to stand, but any further action (i.e. running it into the end zone) is not.
Similar threads
