Who wants to join a revolution against the use of replay as a sports officiating tool?
Bear with me, I am about to speak of a controversial thing.
Every time I express my belief that the use of instant replay as an officiating tool has damaged, not improved, American sports, somebody always pipes up with the same response:
Don’t you want to get the calls RIGHT?
I thought about all this again after watching the end of the first half Saturday in what became Kentucky football’s 29-13 season-opening loss at Auburn.
With UK trailing 8-7 and with a first-and-goal play from the Auburn 2-yard line with 46 seconds left in the first half, the Cats snapped the football to running back Christopher Rodriguez in the wildcat formation.
Watching on TV, it looked that Rodriguez bulled his way over the goal line and into the end zone.
SEC Network play-by-play announcer Tom Hart saw it that way. “Touchdown, Kentucky, and the Cats back in front,” was his real-time call as a “T-O-U-C-H-D-O-W-N” graphic flashed on screen.
Yet none of the officials on the field ruled it a touchdown.
OK, one assumed the Southeastern Conference’s replay apparatus would overturn what looked to clearly be an incorrect (non-)ruling.
After one of the TV replays, color analyst Jordan Rodgers said of Rodriguez, “He’s not down and he’s definitely over the goal line.”
Then the call — which had been deemed an obvious overturn by the TV announcers — was allowed to stand.
As someone who consumes a truly distressing amount of televised sports, that is a scenario I see play out time after time.
After watching numerous replays, the TV announcers will say something like, “That’s definitely a catch. He clearly had one foot inbounds.”
Then, when the replay official makes the official call, it is ruled not a catch.
What such scenarios tell me is that so many officiating decisions come down to what is commonly referred to as “a judgment call.”
That judgment can be rendered in real time by officials on the field and/or court.
Or, after drama-sapping game stoppage to review as many taped angles as possible, a replay official can end up making the judgment call.
Either way, it is somebody making a subjective decision about what they’ve seen.
Given that reality — and here is where things will get controversial — replay is not worth the other costs that have come with its heavy use as a sports officiating tool.
In basketball, replay reviews just destroy the pace of play.
It is especially brutal when replay interrupts late-game situations where tension is building with every possession and then all action gets stopped so the officials can put on headsets and stand around a TV monitor.
While I have no way to prove this other than the eyeball test, I believe the reliance on replay has led to a decline in the quality of officiating across sports.
So if I could be sports czar for one day, I would scrap instant replay totally and go back to having the games that are played by humans and coached by humans be solely officiated by humans — without any reliance on video technology.
Alas, given that the trend in recent years has been toward using video to review calls in more areas, not fewer, that is presumably unrealistic. Therefore, I will again propose an alternative plan for football, basketball and baseball, both college and pro:
In all games, each coach/manager gets two “replay review requests.” No other plays can be reviewed other than those the coaches/managers request.
This makes “how you use your reviews” a humongous part of your game strategy.
Whether or not to “hold onto a review” for the end of a game becomes an essential — and highly second-guessable — facet of a coach’s decision-making.
If you’ve already used both reviews, even if your team then loses in the final seconds on the most egregious blown call of all time, that’s just part of the game.
Alas, even that system would not relieve us from the head-scratching review decision.
Which takes us back to Auburn and the non-TD scored by a Kentucky running back who appeared to end up clearly in the end zone with the football.
At his weekly Zoom news conference Monday, Kentucky Coach Mark Stoops said he had submitted video of the Rodriguez non-touchdown to the SEC office for clarification.
That means Stoops will presumably get an answer about why the play was not ruled a TD, though it doesn’t sound like the rest of us will.
“I can’t ever comment on what they tell me,” Stoops said of the SEC office. “And I haven’t gotten that back yet. So I will wait and hear what the official word is.”
After having reviewed the game video, Stoops was asked what he saw on the Rodriguez run.
“It looked like he was a yard deep in the end zone,” the UK coach said.
Now is where you remind me again that we need instant replay to get the calls right.
