It's Time to End Instant Replay, Again

The first time the NFL approved instant replay, the foray lasted just six seasons. When owners voted to end it, in 1992, the decision was based on two reasons: instant replay slowed down the game too much, and it failed to get the correct calls often enough.

In 1999, the league decided to try again, and since then instant replay's use has widened, sprawling beyond challenges to include every turnover and every touchdown. It's part of why games are going longer than ever before, and instead of celebrating the terrific play you thought you saw, you now have to embrace your inner lawyer and make sure it will stand up to official scrutiny.

This time, when confronted with missed calls and slower games once more, the talk is only about how to expand instant replay rather than scaling it back. But more reviewing doesn't mean fewer problems for the NFL. If anything, it might mean more.

What does instant replay give fans? One of the longest running jokes among football heads is that nobody actually knows what a catch is, but the best satire has a bit of truth in it: the NFL's rules are applied so inconsistently that it can feel like calls come down to getting the right official at the right time.

Men will understand women before anyone knows what a catch in the NFL is.

— Jessica Kleinschmidt (@KleinschmidtJD)December 13, 2015

Instant replay, then, brings us a sense of fairness. The idea that your team will not get bopped by a fluke call. Or, more succinctly, the idea that the right team won. And sure, replay does a fine job as a remedy for reversing easy missed calls. But combine a little referee discretion with a complex rulebook, and more often than not what happens is we waste minutes of our lives and still find ourselves with the wrong result.

Take the case of the Oakland Raiders' win over the Texans in Mexico City last month. Deep in Oakland territory late in the fourth quarter of a tie game, Houston appeared to run for a first down not once but twice. The call was botched both times, but after accepting the initial bad call (on third down), the Texans challenged the second (on the fourth). Spot reviews, because they often rely on conclusive evidence, do not succeed at high percentages (which is why they are the bane of Football Twitter's existence), but it appeared to be pretty conclusive that the ball was farther down the field than the refs had spotted it. The Monday Night Football announcers could only muster, "First down … we think."

The referees upheld the call. Oakland got the ball and immediately led a touchdown drive. Houston lost.

And how about Denver's defensive two-point conversion for a win against New Orleans in Week 10?

Returner Will Parks (#34) has a white shoe on, but you can't tell me that he didn't step out of bounds at the very end of this run, which wound up giving the Broncos a 25-23 lead. To do so would be to deny what is in front of our faces. With 1:28 remaining in the game, New Orleans was forced to try an onside kick. They were unsuccessful. Instant replay failed us again, and then we suffered through five minutes of Phil Simms talking about it.

In many ways, the NFL's replay problem is a symptom of a persistent problem of the leadership in place: they micromanage to such an extent that nobody is able to just do their damn jobs. Referees have been asked to emphasize various penalties depending on the season, such as illegal contact downfield, holding, pass interference, and any contact (even incidental) to the quarterback's helmet. So the definition of what they're looking for is constantly in flux, and they are being asked to expand the scope of their job on the fly. And they aren't even full-time employees.

Just this year alone, the NFL competition committee—which includes zero actual referees, by the way—has approved the following changes:

Here are the NFL rule changes: — Mark Daniels (@MarkDanielsPJ)March 23, 2016

And yes, that is the Ravens at the bottom trying to expand instant replay even more. That got shut down, but they're still happy to talk about it more!

This is all done under the direction of Dean Blandino, the NFL's officiating head who has never actually been on the field. Blandino came up as a replay official, and posts spirited defenses of his interpretations of rules on Twitter every week. Which is great, because he, unlike his officials, doesn't have to make them in real time.

The NFL cares deeply about the perception that the game is not rigged, but rather than help officials, instant replay almost seems to be an excuse for making things more difficult, the cover being, "Well, if they get it wrong, now we can review it!" Whether a play is reviewable or not, a lot of football still comes down to judgment calls on the part of humans—and that, of course, will always introduce the element of human error. Where are the chips in the balls, the cleats, and the first-down markers? Where is our game ball PSI meter for Patriots fans?

The current instant-replay system trades the illusion of fairness for an inferior product. The stoppages are massive time-sucks. With a little planning, you can probably fit a shower into a touchdown-review commercial-extra point-commercial-kickoff-commercial sequence. If you're going to talk about why the NFL product is suffering lately, it says a lot that fans are being fed more dead air time than ever. I can't wait for the 3.5-hour Clete Blakeman show on Sunday.

Somewhere under the sea of penalties, TV timeouts, and instant replay, there is a game that is still played. But don't cheer for anything that's actually athletic and amazing. Wait until the referee tells you that you can.

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