Quote:
Originally Posted by FRPLG
The rules are too byzantine and vast for even the best officials to keep track on every play.
I'm surely in the minority in that I strongly believe replay has made the situation worse and as tool meant to benefit the game, fails miserably. If it were my decision at this point I'd get rid of replay. I really think it makes things worse and only has marginally improved the amount of calls that are "correct"
Chiefly, it only highlights and creates unrealistic expectations of perfection. If situations were allowed to be simply called on the field and left to stand surely some would be wrong but everyone could just move on in most cases because often the calls are usually of minor importance overall. Instead now every close play gets replayed and replayed and is turned into a huge deal. When replay was reenacted it was supposed to fix the big game changing issues. Now it is used to officiate everything basically. We get madder over missed calls because we want everything to be perfect since we have our false god replay. It can't be perfect. We shouldn't support a system that aims to create the fairy tale land of perfection and allows us to enjoy the games less because we can't ever get to that mythical perfection.
Replay also creates the situation with the catch issue. Now we watch all the replays and parse out each millisecond. When something goes wrong then the rules committee adds some more explanation to account for some random and rare situation that they didn't think of before. We can't possibly legislate every possible situation involving a catch. Just have a objective basic rule and let officials call it. Catches are like porn...you know one when you see it.
Replay also has gotten into the heads of a lot of officials. They make calls knowing that replay will clean up the mess. It makes them susceptible to a loss of focus and creates a tendency to always call plays in a way as to allow for replay to save their ass. They should calls plays to get them right instead.
Mostly, replay is simply substituting one form of human error for another.
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I don't disagree with most of what you've said, but I go the other way on it. I think they ought to let the onfield ref's basically handle the game management part, moving the chains, basic time management and on field supervision, but move the penalty portion into the hands of the replay booth. Put body cams on the ref's so that the replay booth is seeing both the overhead and on field views, and buzz the head ref when penalties/errors occur. You take the minutiae of the technicalities away from the on field guys, and let plays develop at speed.
Take a catch for example, let the play move as the most obvious view, so if it looks like a catch move the chains etc, but just like the all scoring plays and turnovers must be reviewed rule, the ball gets put in play after the ok from the eye in the sky. That also gets rid of the hurry up so the other team can't challenge system.
I think you clean up the rules the onfield ref's are responsible for, and move the minutiae to the replay booth. If they don't see it within a reasonable timeframe play simply continues.