Approximately 97,200 years ago, near the modern-day city of Baku, Azerbaijan, a caveman threw a rock in the general direction of another caveman. His intentions in throwing the rock remain unclear, but regardless, the second cave man caught the rock. This caused a third caveman to emit a grunt of approval. Thus was born the concept of sports.
Sports, like humans, evolved a great deal over the subsequent millennia. But one thing remained constant: they have, since that first game of chuck-a-rock, been played at regular speed. Then, a few decades ago, a schism happened. While games were still played at regular speed, fans started to observe them in slow motion, which was fine and good. And then referees started officiating in slow motion. And then it all went to hell.
The allure of replay review is obvious. Why rely on these dinky human eyes and this biased, faulty human brain box, when we could instead use modern technology and the ability to manipulate time like Thanos to wind back each play, frame by frame, to determine Objective Truth?
I admit: I was taken in by these charlatans and their promises of a brighter future, devoid of the flaws and quirks of human observation. But I was wrong. I repent and renounce.
We need to abolish replay review in sports. All of them. Right now.
Yes, I know I need to show my work here. So stop me when the thing I say is inaccurate.
1. Reviews suck.
By itself, this isn’t dispositive. Lots of things suck that are beneficial, if not downright necessary: the dentist comes to mind. Also vaccines. Ohio sucks, but its existence makes drives between Tennessee and southeast Michigan significantly faster. But it’s worth saying at the outset that reviews blow.
This isn’t news, nor is it particularly controversial. As a fan, whether at home or at the stadium, sitting through reviews is awful. Games in all sports continue to get longer, and that added non-sports time has officials considering rule changes to reduce the amount of actual sports. Watching a referee spend 90 seconds deciding whether there is 17.4 or 17.2 seconds left on the clock is infuriating. Watching them spending five minutes reviewing a first down spot you KNOW they aren’t going to overturn is soul-sapping.
2. No specific team would be disadvantaged if we got rid of replay.
Refereeing is zero-sum. Someone benefits from a call, and the other team suffers, but the Law of Large DJ Carstensens says that on a long enough timeline the bad calls will end up as a wash for a given team.
Now, for your favorite team? Your favorite team is already the victim of a massive refereeing conspiracy, and it NEVER EVER EVER get the calls it deserves. This is certainly true of my favorite team. But as we have seen time and again, the conspiracy is strong enough to survive replay, so replay provides no protection against this striped junta.
3. Reviews screw up 100% of the game by addressing 30% of the problems.
Every sport that uses video reviews limits the scope of things that can be reviewed. You can’t review a holding penalty or whether a defender really did hit the Wisconsin jump shooter on the elbow (almost certainly not). Things that are deemed “judgment calls” are generally not reviewable. And that’s the stuff the referees usually get wrong! Refs are really dang good at spotting whether a running back stepped out of bounds, but they turn into the “is this a butterfly” meme the moment they have to identify pass interference. The NFL tried to make pass interference reviewable a couple of years ago, and it was an unmitigated disaster.
Some sports compound the issue by trying to limit review in other ways. Lots of sports have challenge rules; college hockey will let you challenge damn near anything… but only once. Same with the aforementioned NBA challenges. In college basketball, referees can review who touched a ball last or whether the clock was stopped perfectly… but only during the last two minutes. For the first 38 minutes, refs can (and do) boot obvious calls all the time. Things that would take 10 seconds to review in the first half are ignored, while we give the Zapruder treatment to calls with 1:58 left. In the NFL, coaches can challenge stuff in the minutes 0-28 and 30-58. The booth can review things in minutes 28-30 and 58-60, but never the twain shall meet.
Think about what that means. Most of the stuff that matters in a game, and a disproportionate amount of the controversial stuff, ISN’T reviewed. And what’s worse, even though the whole point of replay is “a dozen high-definition cameras in slow motion are better than a 64-year-old with one angle at full speed,” replay still bizarrely defers to the call on the field unless there is [insert league’s specific standard that is more applicable to a criminal trial than to a “did the grown man step on the white chalk when he was trying to step on the green grass?"].
(And this is to say nothing of the fact that referees know everything will be reviewed, so they officiate differently. After all, if you KNOW this incomplete pass will be reviewed to see if it was actually a fumble, why not let the play go? And then if you don’t have a great angle on replay, guess what? We’ll defer to the call on the field. Quite a catch, that Catch 22).
It’s a half-measure, operated as a half-measure because even the half-measure is so obtrusive it is barely tolerable. So even if review was instant and 100% accurate, we would still have massive officiating controversies in basically all sports.
4. Reviews don’t make the game more ‘correct.’
I can hear you now: “Okay, fine. It won’t get everything right. But if it reverses even one call per season, it’s making the overall refereeing accuracy better. That’s just basic logic.”
That assumes that in the process of righting some wrongs it hasn’t fundamentally screw up things that weren’t broken. And that brings us back to the era between 95,177 B.C. and the late 1990’s, when rules were enforced by humans with human eyes at human speed.
For one, very obvious example, let’s take the football concept of the catch. For the first hundred-ish years of football after the invention of the forward pass, the definition of a “catch” was pretty simple: did the dude catch the ball? If so, CATCH! If not, NO CATCH! And that was fine!
But when you slow things frame by frame in 4K HD, you have to decide whether the fact that the fooball rotated five degrees after the ball brushed the ground qualifies as a “loss of control.” The result?
That should be a catch. That should be an epic, phenomenal, Sugar Bowl-winning catch. The kind of catch Hokie fans talk about for years. But because we wanted to be SUPER DUPER SURE it was a catch, it was no longer a catch.
Football is better if that is a catch.
Football is better if this is a touchdown.
It’s not just football. This was an ‘offside’ that overturned a goal in the WORLD GODDANG CUP. This, which any soccer official in the first seven thousand years of organized soccer would have called textbook timing, becomes the dumbest of offsides. Based on this picture, I can’t even say which of those players is technically offside. But he’s offside.
Soccer is better if that is a goal.
Every sport has those. College basketball now specializes in the “defender obviously slapped the ball out of bounds, but it grazed the offensive player’s finger last” call, and its nefarious cousin, the “defender fouled the hell out of the offensive player, causing the offensive player to touch the ball last, but we can’t review the foul and technically it touched the offensive player last so… oopsie?” College hockey… oh sweet tapdancing Jesus on a five minute major please don’t get me started on the impact of reviews in college hockey.
Replay doesn’t make things better. It changes the definition of “correct” to something it can defend. It moves the goalposts because the spirit of the rule is impossible to place into two buckets in a frame-by-frame analysis, which we only need to because we’ve decided we need to look at things frame-by-frame.
5. It’s never going to get better.
The NFL has used the current instant replay system since 1999. College football has used instant replay since 2006. College basketball has used it for decades, and has used its current “let’s make the last two minutes last for 15 minutes” version for about a decade, which is about how long most other sports have tinkered with it. And tell me this: has anyone BETTER at it? Are there any sports that are really dialing in on the optimal use of replay?
Every time leagues try to fix a rule or a use of replay because of an unjust outcome, they end up making the rule worse, and they open an avenue for a new unjust outcome. And if the last decade is any indication, improved technology is only going to make it worse.
6. Sports are just more fun without replay.
Fans will always whine about the refs. It’s part of the gig, and often it is valid. Any sports fan worth his obsessive salt can name you ten plays off the top of his head on which his team got catastrophically hosed.1 But replay doesn’t ameliorate that. It exacerbates it. We are called upon to dwell on the close calls. We have to watch frame by frame for minutes on end, only to be told half the time that our beloved team has been wronged despite this CLEAR EVIDENCE of the righteousness of our cause. Why not let the game play out, let the players decide the game, and then argue amongst ourselves later?
I realized something this year: I don’t celebrate touchdowns when they’re scored anymore. I celebrate touchdowns when the extra point is snapped. Because until the extra point is snapped, it isn’t a touchdown. A goal isn’t a goal until they drop the puck again. Every moment of boundless fan glee is muted by the little voice that whispers “they’ll take a look at that.”
One of my earliest distinct football memories is Mercury Hayes catching that post-corner from Scott Dreisbach in 1995. I specifically remember two thoughts: I thought both “wow I thought he was out of bounds there,” and “WOOOOOOOOOOOOO DOESN’T MATTER TOUCHDOWN GAME OVER.” There was a finality. The athletes defined the moment. It was a quarterback and a receiver and a ball and 101,444 screaming fans. The fact that the referee somehow got the call right makes it marginally sweeter, but only marginally.
Sixteen years later, I stood in the Big House watching Roy Roundtree catch a touchdown pass to beat Notre Dame in the most insane football ending I’ve ever witnessed. And the agony of the ensuing 75 seconds of replay review was partly, though not entirely, drowned out by the revelry of 114,802 other humans singing and screaming incoherently like we had been possessed by the spirit of Denard Robinson.
Seven and a half years after that, Charles Matthews hit a buzzer-beater to beat Minnesota, 59-57. I remember watching the shot, seeing the refs go to the monitor, having time to tuck both of my older kids to bed, then coming back for the exciting moment where the referee kinda waved his arms to declare the game over.
Bring back the old days. Bring us back to the days where we could spend the rest of recess arguing about whether I reached the fire hydrant before you got me with two hands, but we decided to figure it out and keep playing. Let the agony we lament be the agony of the game, not the back of John O’Neill’s head.
Who’s with me?
Desmond was tripped, Spartan Bob, holding call on Karan Higdon, Junior Hemingway against Iowa, The Spot, the rest of the 2016 OSU game, Notre Dame pass interference in the rain, Hutchinson touchdown vs. MSU, Roman Wilson against TCU, targeting against TCU… oh sorry I thought you asked.
I've been watching a lot more international sports and the rugby and cricket replays seem to do things better. Rugby allows everyone to hear the on field official tell the replay official what they saw, what the call on the field is (which they don't have to make), and what they want reviewed. Then you get to hear the replay official explain what they are seeing as the replay goes. Cricket is always fun because the on field official can signal for replay and basically say "I have 0 clue what I saw, tell me the right answer." Again, no necessarily right, but better than the opaque US replay systems. If nothing else, put a cap on replays. If you can't find an answer in 90 seconds, replay over and back to the game
Incredible read. Makes me think of this tweet, ranking lowest Texas A&M moments.
https://twitter.com/jorfid/status/1638211554079326210?s=46
Two of the five most memorable moments in recent history are missed calls. Don't get me wrong, it's frustrating to lose to rivals on a single play. But like you said, Pandora's Box has been opened and now that we know a single play can be reviewed, we will never accept a loss over a single play again.