The sports play of 2025 occurred in a Baltimore Ravens/Pittsburgh Steelers NFL game recently, an important game with AFC playoff implications.
A TD by the Ravens to give them a lead late in a game against Aaron Rodgers (40-something, former Jeopardy! host, and QB for Pittsburgh) was overturned by an “official review” which turned out to be an “official” misreading of the rules, so that millions of football fans now think it is necessary for a receiver to take three steps while holding onto the football in the endzone to score a touchdown (6 points) for his team.
The coach of the Ravens announced in the press conference after the game that he didn’t understand the ruling, but he was confident the “experts” got it right. He succumbed, in other words. John Harbaugh, who is white, simply assumed his receiver, Isaiah Likely, who is black, did not do what was necessary to make the catch.
The NFL overturned Likely’s important catch and every commentator in favor gave the reason that Likely didn’t complete three steps with the ball.
But three steps has never been necessary for a pass completion and the specific NFL rule pointed to in this instance does not say three steps are necessary.
Football fans and football officials cannot read.
Is this a surprise?
You don’t need three steps.
Part B of the “catch” rule says “2 feet down,” not “2 steps.”
Everyone agrees Isaiah Likely got two feet down.
Amazingly, no one, it seems, was able to clearly read Part C.
Not the Ravens head coach.
No one.
The misreading of Part C caused a misreading of Part B. Fans mistakenly assumed “steps” were mentioned in Part B. But only “feet” are.
The false NFL decision was justified in the following manner:
It was “mistakenly” said Likely needed to “take a third step” with the ball (Likely was stepping during the catch, not falling).
Part C, which addresses the “completion of the catch,” does say “additional step.”
First, it should be mentioned that the whole idea of “completion of the catch” is, in itself, problematic. It creates ambiguity where there ought to be none. A player catches the ball. Why should there even be such a thing as the “completion of the catch?” It allows lawyers in the door. It allows the NFL to examine what is separate from “the catch” for the sole purpose that a “catch” might be overturned. Rules are rules. But why are they made? That’s more important.
You caught the ball—but now you need to “complete” it—what?
Part C is where the error of the “three steps” originates.
Likely got two feet down—the third step is not necessary for the “catch.”
“Additional step” in Part C is given as one of several options for “completing the catch,” and two of those qualifying “moves” are: “avoiding the defender” and “extending the ball,” both of which Likely did—as he took his two steps.
But here one can see how the nonsensical nature of “completing the catch” is guaranteed to provoke confusion.
Can Likely “complete” his catch during his catch or does he need to wait to complete it after his catch? It forces a player to catch the ball—and then catch the ball. The whole rule is absurd.
One can see how a mind determined to second-guess a “catch,” can, and will.
In this instance, the defender was behind Likely and Likely was running away from the defender and holding the ball stretched out in front of him so as to keep the ball away from the defender, who was trying his best to knock the ball away as Likely was running from him while taking the necessary two steps (getting “both feet down” necessary for a “catch” in Part B of the rule) while the ball was fully in Likely’s grasp.
The play was called a TD by the officials on the field and the video shows Likely 1) avoiding the defender 2) with the ball secure in his grasp 3) during the time in which he takes two full steps, and is in the act of taking the third step when the ball comes loose.
In both the spirit AND the letter of the law, it is 100% a TD—if one reads the whole rule carefully.
It was called as such by the officials on the field.
It was over-turned by anonymous reviewers watching it from somewhere else.
It is NOT a TD for one reason only.
The NFL is an autocratic organization which can get any result it wants. This is not sports. It is something else. It is like the weaponization of lawfare in politics—the exact same thing. The fussy and complicated rules of the NFL (a “completion” of a catch after the…”catch”) are part of that autocratic behavior.
Football fans know NFL rules are fussy and complicated. Was that a catch? When exactly did the ball come “loose?” Did the turf compromise the catch? Did a tiny movement of the ball in the receiver’s hands indicate the receiver did not have “control” of the ball, even though in the eyes of the whole world, he “caught it?” Fans know that a ball deemed “loose” (even slightly) though “caught,” can, and has, overturned a “catch.”
It does not take a brain surgeon to understand why the NFL prefers their rules to be so complex they defy even microscopic, never mind ordinary, perception. Unseen judges—not the accidents or struggles or eyes of visible officials on the field—can have the final say.
Isaiah Likely, on behalf of all Americans, we are sorry.
Great catch!
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Someone on FB this morning asked this question: Can poems change lives? and the responses included “Dear White America” by Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, Lucille Clifton, Obama, Walt Whitman, and Sylvia Plath.
Here’s what I wrote:
Individual poems can change a life, but it becomes increasingly difficult for that to happen when poetry which supports poems is destroyed, which happens gradually and is undetected by individual experiences. Poetry fell in the late 19th century/early 20th Century period (‘Modernism’) when the world went mad—imperial France and Britain almost took over the world, history painting was replaced by ‘primitive art’— advantageously celebrated by Empire. The gradual destruction is undetected and poetry’s importance is lost and misunderstood—when art declines, education declines, when education declines, journalism declines, and finally the decline itself can no longer recognize anything good, except vaguely and abstractly, and all “knowledge” becomes the property of a Jeopardy! champion or professors who channel narrow and bitter politics.
Scarriet 