Imagine that you’re watching your favorite team’s explosive offense drive down the field.

Suddenly, your dual-threat quarterback breaks free on a designed run and storms past all but one defender for 70 yards and the endzone ahead.

The last cornerback lunges in a last-ditch effort and clips the quarterback’s heel. He stumbles just shy of the goal line but in a desperate effort before falling, leaps and stretches the ball toward the pylon. As he does this, he loses grip on the ball and it slips out, rolling out of bounds in the endzone.

What happens next? The opposing defense is rewarded with possession despite getting burned for 70 yards and having done nothing to secure possession.

Congratulations, your team was just the victim of the worst and most illogical rule in football. Let’s talk about it.

For a sport that debates what constitutes a “completed catch” every week, it’s embarrassingly telling that that isn’t even the dumbest controversy facing it today, just perhaps the most common.

The endzone fumble ruling is one of the single-most impactful rulings that serves no logical point for the way it’s been ruled and that’s a belief I’ve long held.

If a ballcarrier loses possession out of bounds anywhere else along the 99-yard playing field, possession stays with that team. Why does that suddenly change when the ball crosses an arbitrary line such as the endzone?

We saw it happen with DK Metcalf this past season against the Dallas Cowboys. Metcalf burns the coverage but lets up shy of the goal line as Trevon Diggs knocks the ball loose from his hands. The Cowboys were rewarded with a turnover despite only making half of the necessary play.

Now of course Metcalf, or any ball carrier, should be penalized for not completing the play and securing the ball across the goal line. But it needs to be relative to what actually happened. That’s where my proposed solution comes in. The ruling should be an inverted touchback.

If the ball is fumbled out the back or side of the endzone, the team should retain possession but be backed up to the 20-yard line, on the edge the redzone and from there it’ll be first and goal. That way, the defense is rewarded for stopping the offense and earns a 20-yard cushion and the offense still gets penalized but doesn’t lose possession.

The thinking behind it is that the defense is only theoretically making 50 percent of the play needed to force a turnover, so they should be rewarded in some fashion but not completely

For a sport that claims to pride itself on playing to the whistle and finishing, the current ruling being 100 percent in one team’s favor is a stark contrast that rewards a team for only making half a play, and not the most important half. You want possession? Recover the ball, it’s not hard.