Best part of March Madness is being ruined by non-stop instant-replay reviews
Back in the day, the men’s NCAA basketball tournament’s penchant for producing late-game drama made it the best annual sporting event in the U.S. of A.
Alas, that was then, this is now.
In 2022, one thing is consistently draining the end-of-game thrills that made March Madness so compelling. The rampant use of instant replay at the end of games to review both officiating calls and time and clock issues is choking the fun out of too many NCAA tourney games.
It is kind of astounding that, during an era of short-attention spans and unlimited entertainment options, the NCAA has managed to turn the most enthralling part of its sports year into a series of images of middle-aged officials standing in front of a monitor with ear phones on.
As longtime readers know, I fairly loathe the proliferation of instant replay as an officiating tool.
In my view, the cost of “getting the calls right” — a problematic claim in its own right — in this manner is not worth what is lost in terms of pace of play and game-ending excitement.
My solution — across all sports — has been to go to a “challenge system” where each coach can ask for replay review of two officiating calls per game. Beyond those coaching challenges, no other calls can be reviewed.
(In a continuous-action sport such as basketball, you could require coaches to challenge calls immediately and stop play when they do).
Under that plan, you could never have more than four replay reviews in any game.
Though cutting back on replay as an officiating tool swims against the modern sports zeitgeist, there are others who want to go further than I — all the way back to “games played by humans, coached by humans and refereed by humans.”
On Twitter this past week, Seth Davis of CBS Sports expressed support for ending all use of instant replay in college hoops officiating.
“(If) we get rid of replays there will be a small handful of times when we will wish we had it. That small handful is not worth the constant disruptions to the flow of a game,” Davis tweeted. “Get rid of it, and I bet very very few people will be clamoring to bring it back.”
If you follow Jacob Tamme on Twitter, you know that the former All-SEC tight end at Kentucky and member of three Super Bowl teams as an NFL player is skeptical about the overall impact on sports of utilizing replay as an officiating tool.
“I feel about replay about like that old “Anchorman” joke — 60 percent of the time, it works every time,” Tamme said.
In a phone conversation last week, Tamme made a subtle and telling point about the hidden costs of replay as it has become used in the officiating of sports.
“If you think about a college basketball game, what is the point of all these replays, especially at the end of a game?” Tamme asked. “The point is, you don’t want a game-changing, bad call. … We don’t want officiating to change the game.”
However, when the game stops for replay delays, Tamme pointed out that act in itself can change a game in myriad ways.
Those stoppages can break a team’s momentum.
It can give a coach a protracted period in which to draw up a play that they otherwise would not have had.
Also, it can allow a tiring team to catch its breath.
To illustrate how the current system might have impacted a past game, let’s hearken back to one of the great wins in University of Kentucky men’s basketball history.
In the 1998 NCAA Tournament, you might recall, UK rallied from 17 down inside the final 10 minutes to beat Duke 86-84 in the Elite Eight.
As Kentucky mounted its charge, Duke called timeouts with 7:36, 6:55 and 5:21 left in the game. The final one, called on the court during a scramble for the ball to preserve possession for the Blue Devils, was Duke’s final timeout.
Subsequently recognizing that, Kentucky Coach Tubby Smith chose not to call timeouts himself so Mike Krzyzewski could not rally nor instruct his reeling team.
However, if you had the current instant replay system in place, it seems likely there would have been multiple stoppages in play to review calls. That might have allowed Coach K to steady his troops — and that could have changed the outcome of the game.
“The whole point of replay is to try to make sure a game is not affected by a bad call,” Tamme said. “In order to do that, we are reviewing all of these calls — most of which don’t get changed; some of which do — and in the process of that, we are altering the game.”
So, join the movement. Let’s save sports by reigning in the over-use of replay in officiating that is stifling the natural pace of the games and making even so great an event as March Madness less exciting.
