Video Replay

[Huge Talent]

many 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.

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.

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

[Gridiron Ernie]

...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.

Enjoyed (painful though the topic is!) your intelligent rant mountaincat. I'm pretty much onside with your sentiment and point of view. I'm inclined to support putting this 'interesting' experiment behind us. The CFL game was so much more enjoyable without all this stopping and starting. And in the end the decisions are no wiser for it! It's been a revelation to me, because back a few years ago I would have expected these technological developments/advancements to improve the game experience. Not so!

I think it was WestCoastJoe who some time ago made some humorous passing remark about the old days and his dad screaming at Paul Dojack! (For you youngsters he was a longtime CFL head referee who, like pretty well all referees do time to time, drove us nuts throughout the 1950s & 60s. I don't quite recall the 50s era -- too young, but certainly the 60s. And that's so right -- we would scream at the tv screen or down at the field of play... But with all the current changes, we end up screaming anyhow! And meanwhile the organic experience of our beloved game is sliced and diced to death.

[mountaincat]

Speaking of today's tech, I have long wondered why we still rely on human vision to determine things like whether or not a ball broke the plain of the goal line or a first down was made. for example, why couldn't some kind of detection be used to indicate whether a ball has crossed some point or another. Kind of like antishoplifting stuff but more sophisticated? A chip in a ball, detectors under the line kind of stuff? You have to wonder if it would be possible. Maybe not necessarily an improvement but that seems to come up a lot.

I've thought about this too and at first it seems like a solution to what can be a huge grey area--did the ball break the plane or not. but the more I think about it, the more questions I have and I think it would further over technologize the game. where exactly would you put the sensor in the ball, if any part of it can break the plane, without altering its fundamental characteristics?
what happens if the scanner/detector fails...the anti shoplifting stuff is far from flawless or foolproof. what if someone hacks it, to give one team the edge in a goal line pile up where the ball is impossible to see?
why not put sensors all the way around the sideline, and around the edge of every player's shoe? why not just have robots play the game--no more concussions or CTE.

[DanoT]

...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.

Enjoyed (painful though the topic is!) your intelligent rant mountaincat. I'm pretty much onside with your sentiment and point of view. I'm inclined to support putting this 'interesting' experiment behind us. The CFL game was so much more enjoyable without all this stopping and starting. And in the end the decisions are no wiser for it! It's been a revelation to me, because back a few years ago I would have expected these technological developments/advancements to improve the game experience. Not so!

I think it was WestCoastJoe who some time ago made some humorous passing remark about the old days and his dad screaming at Paul Dojack! (For you youngsters he was a longtime CFL head referee who, like pretty well all referees do time to time, drove us nuts throughout the 1950s & 60s. I don't quite recall the 50s era -- too young, but certainly the 60s. And that's so right -- we would scream at the tv screen or down at the field of play... But with all the current changes, we end up screaming anyhow! And meanwhile the organic experience of our beloved game is sliced and diced to death.

I am old enough to remember Paul Dojack, he was the Andre Prolux of his day. Someone that the fans and media gripped about even though the referee does not make all the calls on the field, just announces them all to the public.