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Patriots QB
Tom Brady
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At the recently concluded NFL spring owners meetings, the league decided to tuck and
run.
After at first insisting that there would be no change in the controversial
"tuck" rule that tucked it to the Raiders in the AFC playoffs this season, the
league’s competition committee spent long hours trying to come up with what its
members knew in their hearts they needed to do. Which was to change the tuck rule.
That obscure rule, you may recall, states that a quarterback can’t fumble the ball
once he begins his throwing motion until he "tucks" the ball into his body.
Thanks to that rule, the Patriots got to win the Super Bowl this year, despite the fact
they most likely would have lost to the Raiders in the second round of the playoffs when
Charles Woodson knocked the ball out of the hands of New England QB Tom Brady late in
their snowbound confrontation.
Instantly, it was called a fumble by referee Walt Coleman, and when the Raiders
recovered, no one protested. With less than two minutes to play and New England trailing
and with no timeouts remaining, all seemed lost.
Then the replay official said, "Wait a minute," and the Raiders got it tucked
to them by an odd rule that is written in a way that makes it damn near impossible for a
quarterback to fumble the ball once he attempts a pass.
This is not a loophole in the law. It’s the Grand Canyon, because technically, if
a quarterback simply pump-fakes once and never brings the ball back to his body, he can do
what he wants thereafter and never fear being called for a fumble. This is because he
technically will still be in the continuous motion of throwing the ball, even if he
doesn’t have a thought in the world of actually releasing it.
All of America watched the replay of that non-fumble fumble, and most people living
outside of New England knew the play should have been called a fumble even though the
rules didn’t allow it.
Why?
It’s called common sense.
The quarterback pump-fakes with no intention of passing the ball, brings it down to his
waist, puts both hands on it as he sees a blitzing cornerback about to sack him from the
side, has the ball dislodged as he’s thrown to the ground and it’s ruled an
incomplete pass. If ever there was a clear distinction between justice and the law, there
it was.
Yet, in the NFL’s never-ending struggle to give the offense every advantage known
to man, the rule remains as written after days of wrangling over it by the competition
committee.
So fearful were some members of that committee that a change might result in a rash of
fumbles rather than a rash of incompletions that the issue was tabled until May, even
though coaches like Tennessee’s Jeff Fisher, who co-chairs the committee, insisted
quite rightly that something had to be done.
"I felt like it should be changed," Fisher said following several days of
discussion about possible changes in the rule. "I still feel it should be changed,
but I agree it’s very, very complex. We can’t approach it with a knee-jerk
reaction because of the dramatic effect it can have on the game."
In other words, see you in May.
Efforts to rewrite the rule to make it more logical while avoiding the creation of more
problems for officials has left the competition committee baffled as to what to do, even
though common sense is telling them Brady was no more trying to pass the ball in that
playoff game than Woodson was trying to engage him in a snowball fight.
Everyone knows the call rewarded bad execution and executed a team with good execution.
If that is the intent of the NFL rule book, then what’s the point in having rules?
Or a defense?
Yet the more these guys talk about the obvious, the less obvious it becomes to them.
"When we discussed it in an open forum, it didn’t get clearer, it got
murkier," said Buccaneers general manager Rich McKay, who co-chairs the committee
with Fisher. "The more we discussed it, the more problems we had with it. The largest
discussion we had (on any of eight proposed rule changes) was on the tuck rule.
"We looked at a number of calls, including the Brady call. We didn’t want to
create a tougher standard to understand. We always had the presumption of an incomplete
pass. Now (if the rule is changed) you’d have the presumption of a fumble. All
we’d be doing is increasing the number of fumbles."
Well, if a guy does fumble, what’s wrong with that?
Ron Borges is a columnist for the Boston Globe. |
