NFL admits incorrect application of grounding/illegal touching rules in Ravens-Cowboys

Sometimes, transparency doesn’t show up at all. Sometimes, it just takes a little while.

In conjunction with our effort to understand the failure to penalize Browns quarterback Jameis Winston for intentional grounding on Thursday night in Cleveland, we’ve inadvertently finagled an admission from the league that the rule wasn’t properly applied in Week 3, during the Baltimore-Dallas game.

Second quarter. Cowboys have the ball on their own seven, facing third and 10. Quarterback Dak Prescott drops back into the end zone. As he’s about to be sacked for a safety, he throws the ball to offensive lineman Tyler Smith.

The Cowboys weren’t penalized for intentional grounding, even though Smith wasn’t an eligible receiver on the play. The officials called Smith for illegal touching, and the Ravens were told after the fact that the illegal touch essentially nullified intentional grounding.

“They said that it’s not intentional grounding because somebody caught it, even though it’s an illegal receiver that caught it, which is a penalty,” coach John Harbaugh told reporters during the week after the game. “So basically they get rewarded for having a penalty there, you know? That’s kind of probably not what they want by the rule. So we’ll see. Maybe it’s a loophole in the rule. I’m not sure. Something they’ll probably look at. But because a receiver caught it, you can’t call intentional grounding. Even though it’s an illegal receiver and there’s no eligible receiver in the area. Which would constitute grounding. So . . . that’s what he explained to me.”

The issue came up again because, at first blush, that same loophole seemed to save Winston from a grounding call. He threw the ball to an ineligible receiver, who was called for illegal touching.

That’s why we posted this tweet at the time; we thought the ruling from Ravens-Cowboys was being applied again. But then the conversation shifted to the question of whether Winston was hit while he was throwing, whether the hit significantly affected the throw, whether the throw was being made in the direction of an eligible receiver before Winston was hit.

All the league had to say, in order to short-circuit the entire conversation, was that illegal touching supersedes intentional grounding. Like it did in the Ravens-Cowboys game.

So we asked whether that same twist was applied in Steelers-Browns. Said the league: “In the Baltimore-Dallas game, there was not judged to be an eligible receiver in the area. It was an incorrect application of the rule, as caught by an ineligible player or not, that would be intentional grounding if there was no eligible receiver in the area.”

Bottom line? There’s no ineligible-receiver loophole for intentional grounding. Even if there was nine weeks ago in Dallas, that’s not how the grounding rule is supposed to be interpreted.