NFL Tuck Rule: What It Said and Why It Was Abolished
What the NFL tuck rule said, how it decided the Patriots-Raiders playoff game in January 2002, and why owners voted 29-1 to abolish it in 2013.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NFL Rules24 min read
- Adopted
- 1999
- Abolished
- March 20, 2013
- Repeal vote
- 29-1, two abstaining
- Tuck Rule Game
- January 19, 2002
Rule 3, Section 22, Article 2, Note 2 ran to two sentences. The first said that when a player is holding the ball to pass it forward, any intentional forward movement of his arm starts a forward pass, "even if the player loses possession of the ball as he is attempting to tuck it back toward his body." The second said that once he had tucked the ball into his body, losing it was a fumble. That note sat in the NFL rulebook from 1999 until March 20, 2013, and it is what people mean by the tuck rule.
In plain terms: a quarterback who pumped, decided not to throw and had the ball knocked out on its way back down had thrown an incomplete pass. He kept the ball. The rule is gone now, abolished by a 29-1 vote of the league's owners, and the same play today is a fumble. Almost nobody outside officiating had heard of the note until a snowy Saturday night in Massachusetts in January 2002, when it handed the ball back to Tom Brady and the New England Patriots with a playoff game apparently lost.
What the tuck rule said, word for word
The note lived in Rule 3, the definitions chapter, attached to the definition of a forward pass. That placement matters. It was never written as a special protection for quarterbacks or as an exception to the fumble rules. It was a statement about when a pass begins and when it ends.
Under the note, a passing motion had three phases.
Before the arm started forward, the passer was a runner holding a football. Knock it loose and it was a fumble.
Once the arm moved forward on purpose, a forward pass had begun. If the ball came out from that point on, by his own release or a defender's hand, it was a pass. Hit the ground and it was incomplete.
The third phase was the strange one. If the passer stopped his throw and began bringing the ball back toward his body, the pass was, for the rulebook's purposes, still under way. It stayed under way until the tuck was finished and the ball was secured against him. Only then did he become a runner again.
So the rule produced a forward pass thrown by a man who had no intention of throwing. The word "intentional" in the text referred to the forward movement of the arm, and a pump fake is an intentional forward movement. What the passer meant to do afterward was not part of the test.
| Situation | Under the tuck rule, 1999 to 2013 | Under the rule since 2013 |
|---|---|---|
| Ball knocked out before the arm starts forward | Fumble | Fumble |
| Ball knocked out with the arm coming forward to throw | Incomplete pass | Incomplete pass |
| Ball lost while pulling it back toward the body after a pump | Incomplete pass | Fumble |
| Ball lost after it has been tucked against the body | Fumble | Fumble |
Three of the four rows never changed. The whole controversy, fourteen seasons of it, lived in the one that did.
- 1999Year adopted
- 2013Year abolished
- 14Seasons in force
- 29Clubs voting for repeal
The rule applied from the 1999 season through the 2012 season. The repeal vote was taken at the league's annual meeting in March 2013.
What the NFL rule says now: a ball lost on the way back is a fumble
The question most readers arrive with is whether the tuck rule is still a rule in the NFL. It is not, and the current text was written to leave no doubt.
The definition of a forward pass now appears twice, in the definitions chapter and again in Rule 8, Section 1, Article 1, and beneath it are short items dealing with the cases that used to cause trouble. One says that if contact from an opponent materially affects the passer after his throwing motion has begun and he passes the ball, it is a forward pass wherever the ball ends up. That is the old principle and it survives intact. The next is the replacement for the tuck note: if, after an intentional forward movement of his hand, the passer loses possession of the ball during an attempt to bring it back toward his body, it is a fumble. The definitions chapter adds that a ball lost after it has been tucked into the body is a fumble as well. A further item covers the passer who loses the ball while attempting to re-cock his arm. Fumble again.
Put together, the modern rule draws its line at the top of the throwing motion. Hand moving forward to throw: pass. Hand doing anything else: runner.
What did not change is easy to miss. A quarterback hit in the act of throwing, whose arm is coming forward when the ball comes loose, has still thrown an incomplete pass, even when the ball dribbles out sideways or backward. Fans watching a strip-sack reviewed today sometimes shout "tuck rule" at the screen when the call goes to the offense. That is the forward-motion principle, which predates 1999 and outlived 2013. The fuller version of how the league separates passes from fumbles and from backward passes is in our guide to the NFL's forward pass rules.
The Foxboro play under the current book
Run the 2002 play through the present text and there is nothing to review. Brady's hand has stopped going forward. He is bringing the ball back toward his body, his left hand coming across to meet it, when the hit arrives. The current item on a ball lost "during an attempt to bring it back toward his body" describes that motion almost exactly, and its answer is a fumble. Biekert's recovery stands. Oakland takes over near midfield with a three-point lead and less than two minutes to play, and the Patriots' season almost certainly ends there.
That is the plainest way to measure what the 2013 vote did. It did not adjust the tuck rule or narrow it. It reversed the result on the one play the rule is known for.
January 19, 2002: snow at Foxboro Stadium and Charles Woodson's hit
The game was an AFC divisional playoff, Oakland at New England, and it was the last one ever played at Foxboro Stadium, a bare concrete bowl with aluminum benches that the Patriots were about to leave for the new building going up next door. Snow fell from before kickoff and never let up. The temperature was 25 degrees. The grounds crew kept clearing the yard lines, and the snow kept covering them again.
Oakland, the AFC West champion at 10-6, had the better of it for three quarters. Rich Gannon threw a 13-yard touchdown pass to James Jett in the second quarter. Sebastian Janikowski kicked field goals of 38 and 45 yards in the third. New England, 11-5 and playing its first postseason game under Bill Belichick, had managed one Adam Vinatieri field goal.
| Quarter | Score | Raiders-Patriots |
|---|---|---|
| Second | James Jett 13-yard pass from Rich Gannon, Janikowski kick | 7-0 |
| Third | Adam Vinatieri 23-yard field goal | 7-3 |
| Third | Sebastian Janikowski 38-yard field goal | 10-3 |
| Third | Janikowski 45-yard field goal | 13-3 |
| Fourth | Tom Brady 6-yard run, Vinatieri kick | 13-10 |
| Fourth | Vinatieri 45-yard field goal | 13-13 |
| Overtime | Vinatieri 23-yard field goal | 13-16 |
Down ten entering the fourth quarter, the Patriots went to a no-huddle passing game, and Brady, a second-year quarterback who had started the season as Drew Bledsoe's backup, ran six yards for a touchdown to make it 13-10.
Oakland then had the chance to finish it. With a little over two minutes left the Raiders faced third-and-1, needing a single yard to run out most of the clock, and Zack Crockett was stopped short. They punted. Troy Brown's return ended with a fumble that his teammate Larry Izzo fell on, and New England had the ball near midfield with about two minutes to save its season.
A few plays later the Patriots were at the Oakland 42, first down, 1:50 on the clock. Brady dropped back. Charles Woodson, his former teammate at Michigan, came on a blitz off the slot to Brady's right. Brady pumped, did not throw, and was bringing the ball down toward his left hand when Woodson arrived. The ball came out. Linebacker Greg Biekert fell on it.
The officials signaled Oakland's ball. Raiders players ran off the field celebrating. An offense holding a three-point lead and the football with well under two minutes to play does not usually give either one back, and for a minute or so the game looked finished.
Walt Coleman under the hood
In the 2001 season a coach could not challenge a play inside the final two minutes of a half. Reviews in that window were started by the replay official upstairs, and one was started here. The mechanics of that system, then and since, are covered in our explainer on how NFL replay reviews and challenges work, and the reason the last two minutes are treated as a separate period is in our guide to the two-minute warning.
Referee Walt Coleman went to the sideline monitor and put his head under the hood. When he came out he switched on his microphone and announced that, after review, the quarterback's arm had been going forward and the pass was incomplete.
He did not say "tuck." The announcement described the play as though Brady had been throwing, which he plainly had not, and that mismatch between the words and the pictures is a large part of why the ruling sounded like an invention. Coleman's later explanations were more precise. On the field, at full speed, he had seen a fumble. On the monitor he saw that Brady's arm had gone forward in a pump and that the ball came out while Brady was still drawing it back in. Under Note 2, that was a pass.
- The pumpBrady's right arm moves forward with the ball. By the 1999 note, a forward pass has now started.
- The decision not to throwHe stops the motion and begins pulling the ball down and in toward his left hand.
- The hitWoodson reaches him from his right side and the ball comes loose before it is secured against his body.
- The call on the fieldFumble, recovered by Greg Biekert. Oakland's ball.
- The reviewInside two minutes, the replay official stops the game. Coleman watches the play on the sideline monitor.
- The reversalIncomplete pass. New England keeps the ball at the Oakland 42, second down.
Fourth quarter, 1:50 remaining, first down at the Oakland 42. The sequence follows the ruling as the NFL explained it afterward.
Why the reversal was correct by the rule as written
The honest reading is that Coleman applied the text in front of him. The arm went forward intentionally. The ball was lost during an attempt to tuck it back toward the body. The note's first sentence describes that exact sequence and calls it a pass.
Oakland's argument was never really that the note said something else. It rested on the second sentence. Brady's left hand was at or on the ball when Woodson struck, and the Raiders maintained that the tuck was complete, that he had gone back to being a runner, and that the note's own fumble clause applied. Bruce Allen, then a senior Raiders executive, put the position in a sentence afterward: the rule itself did not bother him, he said, but "the way the rule is written, it was a fumble."
That is a judgment about a fraction of a second, made from a broadcast angle through falling snow. The replay standard of the day required indisputable visual evidence to overturn a call. Coleman judged that the evidence showed the ball not yet secured. The league office reviewed the game that week and agreed with him, and its director of officiating, Mike Pereira, defended the ruling.
A defensible call under a bad rule. Most people who have looked at it closely end up there.
Forty-five yards through the snow: Vinatieri, overtime and a first title
The reversal did not win anything. It gave New England second-and-10 at the Oakland 42 with under two minutes left, a three-point deficit and several inches of snow on the ground.
Brady hit David Patten for 13 yards to the 29. Two incompletions and a short scramble followed, and with the clock running down Vinatieri came on to try a 45-yard field goal. There was no clean spot to kick from and no time to make one. The kick came out low and flat, a line drive, and it carried through with 27 seconds showing. It is often called the greatest kick in NFL history, and it is hard to find an important one made in worse footing; the league's distance records, by contrast, are set in domes and thin air, as our guide to the longest field goals in NFL history shows.
Overtime in 2002 was sudden death with no guaranteed possession for the team that lost the toss. New England won the toss. The Patriots then held the ball for 15 plays and 61 yards, and Brady completed all eight passes he threw on the drive. The one moment of real jeopardy came on fourth-and-4 from the Oakland 28. Belichick could have sent Vinatieri out to try another kick of about 45 yards, and a miss would have handed Oakland the ball needing only a field goal of its own. He went for it, and Brady found Patten for six. Antowain Smith ran to the 9. Brady took a snap, dove forward to the 5 to center the ball between the hash marks, and Vinatieri kicked a 23-yarder to end it, 16-13.
Gannon and the Oakland offense never touched the ball in overtime. The format that allowed that has since been rewritten more than once, and the current version is set out in our explainer on NFL overtime rules.
Eight days later the Patriots won the AFC Championship Game at Pittsburgh, 24-17, with Bledsoe relieving an injured Brady. On February 3, 2002, at the Louisiana Superdome, they beat the St. Louis Rams 20-17 in Super Bowl XXXVI on a 48-yard Vinatieri kick as time expired. It was the first championship in the franchise's history.
The same rule, the same season, the other way
The Patriots had met the tuck rule four months earlier and lost by it.
September 23, 2001, was the first Sunday of NFL games after the attacks of September 11 had postponed a week of the schedule. The New York Jets were at Foxboro Stadium. With about a minute left in the second quarter and the Jets driving, defensive end Anthony Pleasant got to Vinny Testaverde and knocked the ball loose. Rookie Richard Seymour recovered it. Patriots' ball, a scoring threat ended.
Then came the review, and the reversal. Testaverde's arm had gone forward and he had been bringing the ball back. Incomplete pass. The Jets kept possession, tied the game with a field goal on the drive and won 10-3.
The reversal cost New England a takeaway in a game it lost by seven points. It caused no stir. A turnover wiped out in the second quarter of a September game is an officiating footnote, and this one stayed a footnote for exactly four months.
That game is remembered for something else. In the fourth quarter Jets linebacker Mo Lewis hit Drew Bledsoe along the sideline, an injury that kept the veteran out for weeks, and Brady finished the game at quarterback. He started the next week and was not displaced. So the afternoon that introduced New England to the tuck rule was also the afternoon that began Brady's career as a starter, a coincidence nobody could have known the weight of at the time.
Belichick knew the rule in January because of September. Asked about the Woodson play, he said he had known what the ruling should be "because we had dealt with that play a little bit earlier in the year on the other side of it."
This matters to any fair account. The suggestion that a rule was conjured to rescue a home team does not survive the fact that the same note had taken a turnover away from that same home team, in the same stadium, earlier in the same season.
Why the tuck rule was written in 1999
Before 1999 the rulebook already said that forward movement of the arm starts a pass. What it did not say clearly was when a pass that was started and abandoned stopped being a pass. Officials were left to decide, at game speed, whether a quarterback who had pumped was still throwing, had changed his mind, or was somewhere in between.
That is a ruling about intent, and officials dislike those for good reason. Two crews watching the same pump fake could reasonably reach opposite conclusions. The competition committee's answer was a bright line. Stop asking what the passer was thinking. Look at the arm. Once it goes forward he is a passer, and he remains one until an observable event, the ball secured against his body, says otherwise.
The timing was not accidental. The 1999 season was also the year the league brought back instant replay after seven seasons without it, this time with coaches' challenges. Replay rewards rules that can be checked against a picture. "Was the ball tucked yet" can be answered frame by frame. "Had he decided not to throw" cannot.
As drafting, the note did what it was meant to do. It was consistent and it was reviewable. Its defect was in the result it produced. It took the play that looks most like a fumble, a quarterback with both hands coming to the ball and a defender ripping it away, and called it an incompletion.
The rule away from Foxborough
It came up far more often than its fame suggests. Pereira, who ran the officiating department for much of the rule's life, later estimated that the tuck rule decided a play a dozen to fifteen times a season. Nearly all of them passed without comment because nothing rode on them.
A few did not. On October 9, 2005, at Denver, Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer lost the ball in his own end zone against Washington. The ruling on the field was a fumble and a safety. Replay changed it to an incomplete pass under the tuck rule, the two points came off the board, and Denver won 21-19. Washington coach Joe Gibbs said afterward that the rule made no sense to him.
The rule's most important defender eventually gave up on it. After a tuck ruling in the January 9, 2011, wild-card game between Baltimore and Kansas City, Pereira, by then a television rules analyst, said he no longer supported it.
The 2013 vote in Phoenix: 29 clubs for repeal, one against
The competition committee, chaired at the time by Atlanta Falcons president Rich McKay, put repeal on the agenda for the league's annual meeting in March 2013. The proposal was short. Delete the tuck language; say instead that a ball lost while the passer is bringing it back to his body is a fumble.
The case for it had two parts, and neither was about January 2002. The first was that the rule gave answers that did not look like football to the people playing it: defenders who stripped a quarterback cleanly kept being told they had broken up a pass. The second was that the reason for the bright line had weakened. Fourteen seasons of replay had shown that officials, given a monitor, could tell a hand going forward from a hand coming back. The simpler question no longer needed a rule to protect them from it.
Rule changes need the votes of three-quarters of the 32 clubs, which is 24. This one had five to spare, and it would have passed without a single abstainer changing sides.
- For repeal90.6%
- Against3.1%
- Abstained6.3%
Vote taken March 20, 2013, at the annual league meeting in Phoenix. Pittsburgh voted against. New England and Washington abstained.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| For repeal | 29 |
| Against | 1 |
| Abstained | 2 |
Pittsburgh cast the single vote against. New England abstained, and its owner made no secret of why. "I love the tuck rule, and forever will," Robert Kraft told reporters, adding that he knew Al Davis, the Raiders owner who had died in 2011, "is probably smiling."
Washington's abstention drew less attention and has a detail attached to it. The club's general manager in 2013 was Bruce Allen, the same executive who had spoken for the Raiders in 2002. Whether that history explains the abstention is an inference, not a matter of record, and it is offered here as one.
The repeal was not the day's headline. The same meeting approved a rule against a runner lowering the crown of his helmet into a defender in the open field, which was argued over far more loudly. The tuck rule went quietly, and the new wording took effect with the 2013 season. After fourteen seasons there was nobody left who wanted to explain it on television again.
How officials judge a strip now: control, the hand and the frame
Removing the note did not remove the judgment. It moved it to an earlier point in the motion, where it is somewhat easier to see.
A referee watching a quarterback get hit is working through a short sequence. Did the passer have control of the ball when the contact came? Was his hand moving forward with it? If the answer to both is yes, it is a pass, complete or incomplete depending on what happens next. If the hand was still going back, or had stopped, or was returning to the body, it is a fumble.
Replay looks at the same things with the benefit of stopping the picture. The reviewer finds the first frame in which the hand, with the ball in it, begins to travel toward the line of scrimmage, and then the first frame in which the ball is moving independently of the hand. If the second comes after the first, the ruling is a pass. The arm cocking backward is not forward movement, however violent it looks. Neither is the shoulder turning.
Two refinements trip people up.
The ball has to be coming out as part of the throw. A defender who chops the ball out a frame before the hand starts forward has forced a fumble even if the empty hand then completes a throwing motion. Officials call this the empty-hand look, and it is why slow-motion replays of sacks so often focus on a gap of daylight between palm and ball.
And a pump is no longer a shelter. A quarterback who pumps and is hit on the way back down has fumbled, which is the play this whole page is about. Coaches have always taught quarterbacks to bring a pump back with two hands on the ball, and the repeal gave them one more reason.
Crews on the field now tend to rule fumble on anything close and let the play run to its recovery. An incomplete ruling brings a whistle, and after a whistle replay can do only so much: it can award the ball to a team that clearly recovered it in the immediate continuing action, at the spot of the recovery, and nothing that happened afterward counts. A fumble ruling leaves every outcome available to the replay official. That practice, more than any change in wording, is why modern strip-sacks are so often called turnovers first and sorted out afterward.
A quarterback who senses the hit coming has one more bad option, which is to shove the ball forward at nobody. That is a pass under these rules and a foul under another one, described in our guide to intentional grounding.
College football never carried a tuck note. The NCAA rulebook has long tied the start of a pass to forward movement of the hand or arm with the ball firmly in the passer's control, and treats a ball lost outside that motion as a fumble, which is close to where the NFL ended up in 2013. The wider set of differences between the two codes is laid out in our guide to college football rules against the NFL's.
What the call changed: Gruden, the Raiders and the Patriots
The game was Jon Gruden's last as coach of the Raiders in that stint. On February 18, 2002, a month after the loss, Oakland traded him to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Trading a head coach is rare and the price reflected it: Tampa Bay's first- and second-round draft picks in 2002, a first-round pick in 2003, a second-round pick in 2004 and $8 million.
Oakland promoted offensive coordinator Bill Callahan and, for one more season, hardly missed a step. The 2002 Raiders went 11-5, Gannon was voted the league's Most Valuable Player, and they reached Super Bowl XXXVII in San Diego on January 26, 2003. Waiting for them was Gruden. Tampa Bay intercepted Gannon five times, returned three of them for touchdowns and won 48-21.
Then the floor went. Oakland finished 4-12 the following year and did not post another winning record or return to the playoffs until 2016. After that Super Bowl, the franchise that had left Foxborough believing it was robbed of a conference title game went thirteen seasons without playing in the postseason.
New England went the other way. The title that followed the Tuck Rule Game was the first of three in four seasons and the first of six that Brady and Belichick won together through the 2018 season. Where that run sits among the sport's great stretches is the subject of our guide to the greatest NFL dynasties, and the full championship count for every franchise is in our table of Super Bowl wins by team.
How much of this to hang on one replay review is a matter of taste, and the temptation to hang all of it should be resisted. The reversal gave New England a second down, 42 yards from the end zone, in a blizzard. The Patriots still needed a 13-yard completion, a 45-yard kick that most kickers miss in those conditions, a coin toss and a fourth-down conversion. Oakland still had a third-and-1 it did not convert. The Gruden trade, by most accounts, owed at least as much to a long-running strain between the coach and Al Davis as to any single defeat.
What can be said is narrower and still large. If the call on the field stands, the Raiders go to Pittsburgh for the AFC title and the Patriots' first championship season ends in the divisional round with a young quarterback who has yet to win a playoff game. Everything after that is a different history.
How Brady, Woodson and the Raiders have talked about the play since
Charles Woodson has never moved an inch. In every interview across two decades his position has been the same: he hit Brady, the ball came out, Biekert recovered it, and that is a fumble in any language. He went on to a Hall of Fame career with Oakland and Green Bay, won a Super Bowl with the Packers, and still gets asked about one blitz in the snow.
Brady's public line was, for years, a shrug toward the rulebook. The call was the rule; he did not write it. That softened with time. He has since allowed that the play "might have been a fumble," which is about as far as a beneficiary can be expected to go.
In 2022 ESPN gave the play its own film. "The Tuck Rule," part of the network's 30 for 30 series, premiered on February 6 of that year, directed by Ken Rodgers and Nick Mascolo. Its center is a long conversation between Brady and Woodson, the two Michigan teammates sitting together and watching the play. By the film's account they had never talked it through with each other before. The tone is closer to two old friends needling each other than to a hearing, and neither man changes his answer.
The argument New England makes back
The reply from the Patriots' side, made often over the years, is that replays show Woodson's hand striking Brady's helmet as he arrives. A blow to a passer's head was roughing the passer in 2002 as it is now: 15 yards and an automatic first down. No flag was thrown and the contact was not something replay could add. Had it been called, the tuck rule would never have been consulted. Our explainer on the NFL's roughing the passer rule covers what officials look for on that kind of contact.
Raiders supporters do not find this persuasive, and they have not been asked to.
What the Raiders have said
The organization's view has not softened in the way Brady's has. Al Davis, who had spent much of his career in dispute with the league office, did not accept the explanation he was given. When Gruden returned to coach the team in 2018, he raised the play in Woodson's presence without being asked: "Brady fumbled that ball."
Coleman, for his part, has consistently described the review as a straightforward one once he saw the pictures. He worked seventeen more seasons as an NFL referee. In that time the league did not assign him to a Raiders game.
The rule is gone, the stadium is gone, and the two men at the center of the play have made a television program out of disagreeing about it. That is probably the right ending. Coleman applied the note as it was written, and the note was a mistake, and the league took fourteen years and one unforgettable playoff game to admit the second half of that sentence. More of the site's coverage of American sport and its rulebooks is collected on the United States hub.