For the love of logic, put the touch back in touchdown
It’s a contact sport. Yet players can score without contacting the end zone. Why is that?
News Desk: Worst of the 2025 regular-season. See below.
All of these plays were ruled touchdowns. Yet never did the ball or ball carrier touch the end zone. Since 2020, fans have witnessed this more than 350 times.
Clockwise from top left: NBC Sports, Fox Sports, CBS Sports. Fox Sports
Airspace touchdowns 1) occur too often (almost 1 in every 4 games), 2) are farcical to watch, and 3) diminish the game we love. Fans deserve better.
Fix the Rule News: Touchless = senseless
Our recap of Week 18, the final week of the NFL’s regular season, includes a sampler of pylon follies showcased during the latter stages of the college bowl season. How the public blithely accepts these rulings as somehow logical leaves us dizzy in disbelief.
As does this home page gem from Week 17, where Minnesota’s Jordan Addison gets a shadow of the ball over an outside corner of a fully out-of-bounds pylon as he soars wide of the end zone, never coming close to touching it. Somehow, this means he gets six points. We don’t understand why, but this is how football is officiated 26 years into the 21st century. How about that?
That puzzler is showcased in our Week 17 recap, and our Week 15 recap documents the bizarre, game-deciding ruling that ended the Dec. 13 Celebration Bowl, the HBCU national title game between South Carolina State and Prairie View A&M.
Thanks for visiting.
Video and game image: Netflix
What if break-the-plane logic was applied to other games?
Hole in one
The ball is clearly breaking the plane of the cup, so it’s in. Put me down for an ace.
Home run
Who cares if the ball is in the glove? It broke the fence’s plane on the fly.
Bucket
Your corner three rimmed out? Easy. It dipped below the rim, so it’s good.
Cornhole
That bag is breaking the plane of the hole. We’ll take three points.
Ringer
Look, the shoe is breaking the plane of the stake. Three points for me.
Inside Fix the Rule
In brief
What we’re up to, in as few words as we can manage.
Concept
Learn about the Super Bowl touchdown that lit our inquisitive fuse.
New rule
Few rules are perfect, but we say our idea is better than the existing rule.
Pylons
What exactly are these orange foam antennae intended to do?
Ratings
Not all ATDs are equal. The ugliest of them earn The Full McEnroe.