Here's the NFL rule for how you can declare yourself down without be contacted by a defensive player or stepping out of bounds...
View attachment 73340
I find it hard to believe that the receiver was actually down long enough for the zebra to consider the receiver DOWN by declaring himself down by clearly giving up and making no move to get up. That process needs to be clear... the ball carrier needs to lay on the ground for a couple of seconds at least before a ref could possibly see that he is clearly not going to make an attempt to advance the ball.
Yesterday, that Seadderall receiver caught the ball while he was going to the ground to catch it. He didn't catch it while standing up and then purposefully drop to the ground to make it clear that he was giving himself up on the play. Like I said, the receiver actually had to make a diving attempt just to catch the pass, so he was on the ground basically when he was in the process of catching the pass. The ref that granted the timeout was actually behind the receiver and did NOT HAVE any clear view as to whether or not the catch was actually made clearly... all he could see from his vantage point was the receiver's back, so that zebra had no way of declaring that a legal catch was made because he could NOT see the ball. In today's NFL, a receiver has to make the catch by having both feet or another body part down on the field of play before touching out od bounds. Then, the receiver has to make some kind of "football move" after that happens and hang on to the ball throughout the entire catch process before the zebra can declare that a successful reception was made. In this case, the zebra had no clear view of the ball... he could not have been able to declare the ball caught successfully if we're being honest. Much less could he have been able to do all of that in the tiny amount of time that he actually did it in yesterday.
That fakkuh (the zebra) declared the ball caught without being able to see the ball while watching the receiver go through the entire catch process, decide that the receiver was CLEARLY giving himself up, and then recognize the timeout request by the receiver in lass than a second. It was like 2 Top Gun fighter pilots maneuvering their jets perfectly while flying through the air without crashing. The level of coordination and timing between the ref who could not see the ball and the receiver diving to the ground in hopes of actually catching the ball was damn near instantaneous.
Go to the 12:23 mark to watch that play yourself. That ref did not have the ability to make the call he made of a completed catch all by himself... much less see that the catch was made and then being able to clearly see that the receiver was giving himself up on the play. That was bullshit.
View: https://youtu.be/S0yqdJlujsw?si=g1Jv-USel3MhhBxt
And just to throw something else out there about this. The receiver could not legally call a timeout until ball was actually declared dead by the zebra. This ref was trying to say all of that happened in basically less than a second of time. Here's the NFL rule for when a timeout can be legally called for by a coach or player.
View attachment 73343