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Answer for NFL replay review up in the booth


All of the N.F.L. power players are in Florida for the owners’ meetings. Being discussed, among other things, are possible rule changes for 2012 and beyond. One proposal from the Buffalo Bills is for the replay process to be confined to the booth. This idea is long overdue. It was written about in the Fifth Down blog in December after a replay procedure took over 10 minutes in a Raiders-Packers game.

Also on the table is a rule change that would mandate automatic replay for all turnovers. Last year, the N.F.L. put in automatic reviews for all scoring plays. Those reviews were often efficient and unobtrusive because…they were confined to the booth! (Although they became annoyingly long whenever the booth ruled that the head official needed to go under the hood for a closer inspection.)

Finding a quick, painless way to review all turnovers is a good idea, but here’s a better one: just make all plays automatically reviewable up in the booth, and give the booth official the power to override any on-field call. This is the direction the N.F.L. is going in anyway.

The understandable concern is prolonging the game. College football has an out-of-control replay setup; every play is subject to booth review and each team has one challenge. But the N.F.L. could instruct replay officials to be judicious with their powers. The league could publicly trumpet its goal of officiating perfection while privately telling the booth lords that it’s better to have a minor missed call or two and maintain the flow of a game than to nitpick for 3 hours 45 minutes.

When you think about it, red challenge flags are dramatic and fun, but it’s senseless to have a system that saddles a head coach with the responsibility of monitoring his team and the officiating crew. Why should arguing calls be a built-in element of strategy? In every sport, the goal with officials is to make them unrecognizable. Having replays quickly take place automatically and in a booth rather than in deliberate fashion on the field is the best way to do that.

With the turnover review rule change likely to receive the 75 percent of votes needed to pass, just about every significant on-field situation would now be subject to automatic review. By still leaving teams with a pair of challenges (and a third if the first two are successful), the N.F.L. is just inviting coaches to be more aggressive with their red flags. It would suddenly be less harmful to, for example, challenge a 3-yard catch near the sideline.

Referees are plenty prominent as it is. In a heavily-flagged game, they get as much full screen time as the coaches and quarterbacks (which is why most football fans now know who Ed Hochuli is). This needs to change. That can happen with one final all-encompassing correction to the system: the automatic reviews of all plays from the booth.

This article was written by Jack Styczynski and appeared in the New York Times.

Posted by Necesitamos Mas Football on 6:32 p. m.. Filed under , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0

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