Great post. I agree that no replay is better than too much. And I love the point about the spirit of sport - non stop action, fun, less analysis.mountaincat wrote: ↑Tue Aug 01, 2017 4:49 ammany years ago there was an early morning show carried on 1040 called "the first team on fox", hosted by steve czaban out of washington dc. by the time 1040 affilated with fox sports radio and picked up this show, it didn't have a very long run before it was axed by fox, which has never managed to find a stable longterm replacement for that time slot. call it the curse of "the czabe". anyway, in my relatively short time listening to the show on our local station, i kinda got hooked on this guy's intelligent and frequently contrarian takes (only on sports -- when he has veered into non-sports stuff at times, he comes off as a wannabe shock jock). i've followed him on and off over the years as some version of the show has lived on somehow on this or that network (currently, i pick it up on podcast from espn980 in washington). he's been doing sports radio for 25 years.
to cut to the point, for the last few years, he's been steadily beating a very contrarian drum on this issue of replay. his solution: get rid of it. completely. replay reviews are killing sports, especially football. the game was meant to be played at, and enjoyed at full speed, and you either accept it that way, with human error, or you over-analyze, over-technologize, and -- if you take it to its logical conclusion with 4k and much higher resolutions on the way -- over-quantify every possible play to an absurdly granular level, where we will be zooming in on individual blades of grass or pellets of fieldturf to see if a player's foot landed in bounds or not.
no one knows what a catch is anymore in the NFL. no one knows what PI is in the CFL. replay isn't helping, it's making it worse. and it's slowing down what is supposed to be a fast, exciting game and making it boring.
it's the blind faith that technology will solve all human shortcomings that led us here. the thing is, technological tools are not themselves neutral or flawless, and are only as good as the human hands that wield them and the human biases that go into their design and application. replay reviews in football are being used clumsily and changing the game for the worse. you either continue to awkwardly wrestle with this technology while the game slowly dies, or hand it all over to the coming AI computers to decide (might sound crazy now, but today's replay tech would've sounded crazy a few generations ago), or... you live with the occasional missed call like we all used to before. was it purrfect then, of course not. is it purrfect now, hell no. there's no such thing as purrfect. this is supposed to be a game. it's supposed to be fun, to play and to watch. you're supposed to run around, get the ball in the other team's end zone, and keep it outta yours... not analyze to death every minor detail of every single slightly ambiguous play or call.
I do think replay has the potential to improve sports. For example, tennis executes the replay brilliantly. In fact, it goes beyond just getting the call right, it adds another element of excitement and suspense for the fans. Here's why imo: 1) it's fast. 2) the fans see it in real time 3) the graphic was made fan-friendly, as part of the fan experience.
Here's where baseball does it correctly: judgment calls are not reviewable!
That PI review and over turning on 3rd down vs Edmonton highlights why judgment calls should not be reviewable.
I don't like automatic review on scoring and turnovers, as these slow the game and are often completely unnecessary. Give the coaches the option to challenge once per half, narrow the scope of reviewable plays, and improve the quality and speed of the reviews.
Thanks for reading,
HT