CFN Viewer's Guide: Uncatchable Passes

There's one more part of football that deserves fresh attention every Saturday and any other time college football is played: the uncatchable forward pass. Easy answers are more elusive than you might first think.

One of the more irritating parts of watching football is that certain rule provisions – still on the books – are ignored by officials on gameday. The simultaneous possession rule pertaining to catches of forward passes is one such rule, but it comes up rarely. Another rule provision that emerges far more regularly is the uncatchable forward pass, which dictates that pass interference can't be called against the offending player (holding, yes, but not pass interference).

A few games from 2011 immediately come to mind when identifying instances in which an uncatchable ball should have been ruled: Michigan State-Nebraska, Florida State-Clemson, and the Alamo Bowl are just three among dozens and dozens of examples. In those contests, officiating crews consistently lacked the willingness to say that a ball couldn't be caught, thereby throwing flags that shifted in-game momentum. The bias on this specific aspect of officiating is clear. It's not that officials are biased against teams or players, of course; it's that their decision-making processes lean in favor of one interpretation over and against another.

This is where the subject of uncatchable balls becomes tricky… and therefore needs to be discussed with a certain degree of delicacy.

A strict, literal reading of the word "uncatchable" is what you normally see in evidence on gamedays. Officials gravitate to the school of thought which says that there must be zero chance of catching a pass if a ball is to be deemed "uncatchable." Taken in that vein, such an interpretation can be seen as legitimate. Using a standard of complete certainty, not reasonable doubt, is valid and worthy of consideration. This is how officials think; definitionally, who can blame them? No one.

Yet, this strict interpretation invites problems related to the fundamental integrity of competition in football. The explanation is appreciably simple.

Let's say there's a five-percent chance that a pass will be caught. (Don’t get hung up on the exact number here; the point is that a pass has a very small chance of being snagged.) The quarterback likely made a poor throw in order to create such a low percentage. A receiver is placed in a position where he must either sprint or lay out his body to make a catch. If a pass is near the sideline or any other boundary, a receiver will have to contort or twist his body to an unusual extent. The strict literalist will say, "Hey, there IS a five-percent chance the ball can be caught! Pass interference it is!" The opposing position would counter by saying, "Why penalize the defense for a quarterback's poor throw or, on a larger level, a passing game's lack of precision?"

If there's an extremely low chance that a pass can be caught, that pass might be "catchable" in a narrow context, but the offense has not demonstrated superiority over and against the defense. The point of the uncatchable-ball rule should be to reward the offense for reasonable effort and the reasonable likelihood of success that accompanies it. Instead, officials use the strict and literal interpretation. Which version serves competitive integrity to a greater degree? That question remains up for debate, but if the fundamental principle of "rewarding quality" (and thereby punishing a lack of quality) is to be honored, the "competitive integrity" view of the uncatchable pass rule should hold precedence over the more strict definitional reading of the rule.