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: A review of FTR’s mission and priorities in 2026. 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 400 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.

Airspace touchdowns (ATDs) are:

Regular-season TD totals confirmed via Pro Football Reference.

Select (or scroll to) Scoring Offense, then view the AllTD column.

2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020

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.

Week 7 recap

We are nearing the halfway point of the 2026 NFL regular season. Let’s review this site’s priorities as we move forward:

1) Educate fans on the fact that pylons are fully, entirely, 100 percent out-of-bounds field markers. The existing break-the-plane rule credits ballcarriers who hit one with the ball, or simply wave the ball above one, with a touchdown. But why? This is an absurd ruling — a gimmick designed to artificially create more scoring no matter how illogical the action appears.

Look at this example from Week 17 of the 2025 season. Minnesota’s Jordan Addison gets only a shadow of the ball over an outside corner of an out-of-bounds pylon. He lands out of bounds, never touching the end zone. Why is this worth six points?

2) Persuade fans to question the acceptability of corner-cutting touchdowns, where ballcarriers, to avoid tacklers, run wide as they near the goal line — so wide that they step over the end zone as they pass over the goal line (breaking the plane) and land out of bounds. This is unfair to defenders, who find that they are forced to defend an extra-wide end zone.

Check out our recap of Week 1 of the 2026 season for examples of both types of flawed touchdowns. So far, 22 have occurred through the season’s first seven weeks.

The crusade continues. Thanks for visiting.