The NFL's Down by Contact Rule Is Dumb as Hell

I have always had a problem with the NFL's handling of a player being down as opposed to college football's, but it has never manifested itself to exhibit its flaws more perfectly than on Trever Lawrence's game-winning touchdown against the Chiefs on Monday night.

With less than 30 seconds left and no timeouts remaining, Lawrence takes a snap from under center and gets his foot stepped on by his right guard, causing him to go to the ground. In college, that would have been the end of the down and the Jags would have been scrambling to get back to the line of scrimmage and run another play under duress with the clock running. Instead, Lawrence was able to get up like nothing happened and run the ball into the end zone for a touchdown that could dramatically alter both the Jaguars' and Chiefs' seasons.

Now, if you like this rule, let me just posit this: the defense's job on every play is to either get the offensive player with the ball on the ground or not allow the ball to be completed to an offensive player in the first place on a pass. In the latter scenario, if a quarterback overthrows a receiver by 10 yards and the ball falls incomplete, we treat that the same as if a defensive back made a perfect break on the ball and had a great pass break-up. But if an offensive player falls to the ground on his own, he can just get right back up? Let's at least have some consistency. If you can do up-downs on the field until a defensive player touches you, then make every incomplete pass a live ball until a defensive player touches it, too.

I know I'm probably asking a lot of the league that still isn't exactly sure what a catch is, but this rule doesn't make any sense and it should be fixed.