At the 2018 NFL league meetings, NFL owners and executives decided to make the rules pertaining to what is and what is not a catch more simple and less subjective. So, they voted to make the part of the rule defining a catch having to do with “surviving the ground.”
What does that mean? It means that since 2018, any receiver who caught the ball and maintained control to the ground while having two feet or another body part in bounds, and making a football move, had possession of the ball. No longer did the ball have to be in the player’s possession after the ball hit the ground for it to be a catch.
