Armchair Quarterback: Replay works, but still needs adjustments

I don’t care about old school, replay is the way to go when it comes to football.

How many injustices over the years could have been corrected by use of video tape? Had there been replay a few years back, it would have been the Bucs playing the Titans in the Super Bowl instead of the Rams if you will recall the blown end zone call at the end of the NFC Championship game. Had we had replay, the ‘touchdown catch” which every Vol fan knows was no catch by Florida when the guy dropped the ball like a hot potato would have been called incomplete.

Face it, officials are fallible. For the most part they do get calls right, but there are times, key times in the game, where a bang-bang play can be missed. It’s times like these when replay becomes huge, where the rest of the world is seeing exactly what happened. Back before replay, officials were powerless to do anything even when the big screen above them was showing, in graphic imagery, that the call was blown.

While replay is a good thing, anyone who was watching the Michigan versus Nebraska showdown in the Alamo Bowl recently knows the college version of replay needs to be tweaked in what has become its experimental year.

Actually, the Alamo Bowl demonstrates both the need for replay and the need for changing how it’s done on the college level. If you noticed, there were numerous calls overturned, including the calling back of two touchdowns. There were also other isolated calls which were reviewed and overturned throughout the game which analysts on ESPN did say was one of the worst officiated games they had ever seen.

Specifically, replay officials were slow to call replays on two key plays, forcing Michigan to call time-outs twice to give replay officials time to decide to call a replay. It was the use of these time-outs which likely cost Michigan the game, or at least a legitimate shot at the game. Why replay officials, whose only job upstairs is to operate the replay, took so long to decide on a replay is beyond me. But, it’s happened all year in college. The officials will wait until after a time-out or even a long television time-out to stop play as the ball is being set for play.

What needs to happen is a marriage between the pro and college systems which I think should be uniform for both.

First, college, like pro, should be on a challenge basis where coaches can ask for a replay but risk a time-out in doing so. In this way, coaches aren’t at the mercy of a replay official to hit the buzzer before the next play is run, plus this limits the number of slowdowns for review.

Also, the replay system in pros should be like college in that the officials upstairs should make the call once a challenge is made. Why you have some guy squinting through a little peep show opening on the field is beyond me.

Plus, I suspect some refs don’t want to eat crow and admit they made the wrong call. A separate official with large monitors upstairs would be quicker and more accurate and it would cut the slowdown caused by communication between the sideline official and officials in the pressbox.

In short, keep replay but keep tweaking it until we get it right.