Weird stuff happens
That’s why the NFL shouldn’t overreact and start reviewing guesswork plays
Rarely has a coach been as displeased to be proven correct as Sean Payton was on Sunday.
The New Orleans Saints coach, along with most of Louisiana and pretty much everyone watching the NFC Championship, was properly miffed about the spectacularly botched noncall that came late in the fourth quarter. It looked like a pass-interference penalty on Los Angeles defensive back Nickell Robey-Coleman in real time, it looked even more obvious in slow motion, and for reasons known only to the on-field officials, it was not called. The blown call effectively put the wrong team in the Super Bowl.
Payton, sort of, saw this coming. In October, when a late pass-interference call went against the Saints (in a game they won anyway), the coach said he wished that such penalties were reviewable. “That specific call is so critical to get right,” Payton said then. Give the man points for prophecy, I guess.
Not surprisingly, the notion that pass-interference calls should be reviewable is getting a lot more traction after the NFC debacle. Various outlets have reported that the NFL’s competition committee will give a serious mulling to changing that part of the replay rules in the coming off-season. Payton is one of many coaches who have called for such a change before — pass-interference penalties, on average, are the most impactful in terms of yardage surrendered — and the glare of such an obvious boner will no doubt make several owners keen to correct the problem. They shouldn’t, though. It’s easy to see the case for why they might. If the idea of employing instant replay to correct on-field mistakes is to ultimately provide a fair result, then it’s hard to come up with a more obvious unjust result than the one that took place in New Orleans. Roby-Coleman blasted Saints receiver Tommylee Lewis before the ball arrived, he made no attempt to play the ball at all, and he didn’t even turn his head to look for it. Sometimes these are bang-bang plays that are hard to evaluate in real time, but not in this case. Lewis hadn’t even extended his arms yet to reach for the ball when Robey-Coleman plowed into him — a clear sign that the defender had arrived early. It was about as wrong a non-call as it is possible for a non-call to be wrong.
But as much as making such penalties reviewable would have corrected this particular injustice, the rule change would invite countless more. Pass interference is among the most inscrutable of rules, where an official is assessing when contact between defender and receiver is made, whether the contact is significant, whether the ball is even catchable anyway, and, oh yes, also the intent of the defender in question. Was he trying to impede the receiver or just making a play on the ball? Officials trying to determine all that in the moment are bound to get some calls. But officials using the benefit of replay are bound to get some wrong, too. It’s not just that pass interference is a judgment call — many reviewable plays are judgment calls — it’s that it’s the most subjective of judgment calls. An obvious mistake such as the one from Sunday afternoon would be corrected, but how many others, where receiver and defender collide right around the time the ball is touched, would be thrown into doubt? With all plays in the final two minutes already automatically reviewable (as opposed to requiring a coach to use a challenge), NFL games at the close of a half would be subjected to replay reviews of every contested pass.
And yes, the CFL already allows pass-interference penalties to be reviewed, but is that system objectively better? As often as not, it replaces one tough and subjective on-field ruling with an equally subjective ruling after the replay has been viewed. How many times have you seen a broadcast crew confidently decide which way a review will go, only to have the opposite ruling made?
That is, ultimately where the problem lies with replay expansion in all sports. The use of technology makes perfect sense when it is applied to specifically remove human error. Was the foot in bounds, or on the chalk? Did the ball cross the goal-line? (By all means, put GPS chips in the football to make those determinations more accurate.) But once that same technology is being used in the service of guesswork, all it does is exchange one group of angry fans for a different group of angry fans — and the games take longer, the flow is interrupted constantly, and every big play must be celebrated with a sense of trepidation.
We want fairness in our sports, I get it. I just think that’s an impossible goal. It’s the pursuit of objective justice when the games, and the rules, are a collection laws that require all kinds of judgment and interpretation. Weird stuff happens. Sometimes it is the fault of a player or coach, sometimes there is an official involved. There was no horrible blunder in the AFC title game on Sunday, save Andy Reid’s first-half game plan, but I don’t imagine too many Chiefs fans felt, when it was over, that the result was either fair or just.
Crushing defeats are part of sports. All the replays in the world won’t solve that problem.