Get rid of replay now
NFL proving concept must be ditched
Would the world come to an end if the National Football League — all professional sports leagues, for that matter — scrapped using replay to change or verify on-field calls?
Before making my case, let’s get the get-off-mylawn stuff out of the way. Not only am I OK with most technological advances, I live for them. I own an iPhone, an iPad and an Apple computer. There’s a flat screen in the den. Such is my curiosity with the ways of Waze that I use it to drive to the corner store and back. My dogs have tracking chips implanted in their bodies.
So get off with the getoff-my-lawn stuff.
But here’s what you need to know about professional sports: Those are flawed human beings down there throwing the passes, making the pivot, hitting nothing but net and blasting them home from the point. They are otherworldly talented, sure, but at the end of the day they are human beings who make human mistakes.
Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback ever, committed an atrocious interception the other day that was returned for a touchdown. Bill Buckner broke into the big leagues at 19 and achieved the rare feat of playing in four different decades, which means he must have been a pretty good ballplayer, but he also committed an error in the 1986 World Series that didn’t stop being an annual autumn talking point until 2004 when the Red Sox finally won a championship. Bobby Orr once missed an open net. (I made that last one up. It’s likely No. 4 never missed an open net. Just making a point.)
And the point is this: If we accept the reality that pro athletes are flawed human beings, why not have flawed game officials alongside them?
It’s one thing to say “we have the technology,” but something else all together to be prisoners of that technology.
And that’s what’s happening in professional sports in general and in the NFL in particular.
As if you hadn’t figured it out already, the jumping off point for this missive is the horrible injustice that was done to the Buffalo Bills last Sunday at Gillette Stadium.
It looked as though Bills receiver Kelvin Benjamin scored a second-quarter touchdown against the Patriots. He caught the ball in the end zone, deftly dragged his feet before going out of bounds, and a game official raised his hands in the air.
But then the replay folks back in New York put the play under a microscope for a look-see . . . and kept looking . . . and looking . . .
Eventually, they found what they were looking for — incomplete pass.
This is how replay is supposed to work: When a decision has been reached, fans on both sides of the call should be in agreement. You may not like it if the call goes against your team, but you, like the replay officials, saw the play from 17 different angles. You understand where they were coming from.
That’s not what happened here. The Bills were jobbed, plain and simple, and let’s stop for a moment to consider this is a franchise that hasn’t been to the playoffs since the 1999 season. That’s the year before Brady entered the NFL. So what we have, then, is a fan base from a city with a struggling economy, hoping against hope that this is the year the Bills will get back into the Super Bowl tournament, and they get a gut punch by a bunch of people in a conference room.
Bills owner Terry Pegula, appearing yesterday on Buffalo station WGR550 AM, said, “Everybody I talk to, and they’re not Bills fans, they’re not necessarily anti-Patriots, but they’re all baffled by that call. It just wasn’t consistent with what replay ... replay was developed by this league to correct obvious mistakes. And if you gotta look at a play 30 times from five different angles and keep looking at it and looking at it and looking at it, you go with the call on the field. (That’s) what the league’s been doing ever since replay started.”
Pegula also said this: “I don’t know what’s going on, but we have to fix it. And I’m not saying that as the owner of the Bills, I’m saying that as a football fan. We can’t have stuff like this happening in our league.”
How could any fan in any market possibly disagree with Pegula’s sentiment?
Wait, I do have one small quibble. Change “we have to fix it” to “we have to get rid of it,” and I’m on board. Simply add a collection of imperfect game officials to a collection of imperfect athletes and then watch them do what they do.
If the athletes screw up, they screw up.
If the game officials screw up, they screw up.
That’s the way it worked for more than a century, and the leagues thrived. Were there blown calls? Yes. Hometown calls. Yes. Injustices? Robbery? Yes.
And yet the leagues kept expanding. Larry Barnett may have blown the Ed Armbrister call in the 1975 World Series between the Red Sox and Reds but it didn’t stop baseball from expanding to Toronto, Seattle, Denver, Miami, Phoenix and Tampa Bay.
In the interest of disclosure, a couple of years back I wrote a column stating that baseball should get rid of replay. But in that column I stated that the NFL should keep it, given the whole “Game Day” mentality that inspires fans to devote an entire day to their team.
I was wrong.
Get rid of replay. All of it. Will my plea go anywhere? Nah. But that’s only because we are slaves to technology, and because it’s important to “get it right.”
Ask Bills fans how that’s working.