After Further Review

After Further Review

There is a lot of football to scrutinize over the Holidays. The college season is winding down so a lot of massively hyped bowl games are taking place, and the NFL is heading into the playoffs.

And nowadays, watching football means a lot of this stuff:

“After further review, the player did not complete the process of the catch in the endzone. Therefore the pass is incomplete. 4^th down, clock operator, please reset the clock to :14 seconds please.”

Are you ready for some football?

“The ruling on the field is confirmed”

“The ruling on the field stands”

“There is insufficient video evidence to overturn the ruling on the field”

“Green Bay is challenging the ruling on the field of a completed pass”

“San Francisco is challenging the spot of the ball”

 It used to be the officials made some bad calls every game, and it was just part of the game. It sucked when your team got jobbed, but overall it happened pretty equally to everyone. Then in the 1990s something changed. Extreme slow-motion improved to the point that often enough, you could really tell if an official made the right call or blew it. Enter the American sense of justice. Enter the American spirit of indignation. If we can see a replay that clearly shows the ref missed the call, shouldn’t we be able to use that information to make the game more fair? Of course we should. Why wouldn’t we? Everyone just wants the call to be correct. 

Actually that is not entirely true. What everyone really wants is entertainment on Sunday afternoon. We happen to love football, it appeals to our bloodlust, our loyalty. It also appeals to what we might consider more lofty impulses; the appreciation of finely tuned athletes, team spirit and cooperation, perseverance, hard work, dedication. And of course there is the money. Lots and lots of it. Fox, CBS and NBC each pay a billion dollars a year to broadcast the NFL. That does not include other networks like ESPN, or the cost of airing highlights on other channels, and does not begin to touch ticket sales, concessions, merchandise, and all the rest. 

But there’s more, a lot more, and it’s stuff we don’t like to think about because it would make us feel crappy. For instance, instant replay appeals to our geeky side. It appeals to the whiner in all of us. Every American has a little bit of geeky whiner in them. In American sport we want to legislate, to litigate, to argue and debate just as much as we appreciate the sport itself.  A football game is billed as 60 minutes long divided into four 15 minute quarters. But if you add up the total amount of time from snap to whistle for the entire game, it’s only about 8 minutes. 8 minutes, get out your stopwatch next weekend and see for yourself. No wonder we want video review of every nanosecond.

The problem with replay in football is that it reflects our litigious nature, and if you really like the competition on the field, it’s pretty obvious that adding more and more elements to the review process just plain sucks. Oh and while I’m at it, football should stop trying to be so old school. For a sport that now video reviews every play, isn’t it purposely old fashioned to check a first down by bringing chains out on to the field? There are numerous other options to measure for a first down that would be faster and more accurate. But football wants those moments of the players huddled around the nose of the football waiting for the chain to go down – first down or turnover on downs? Drama. But there are ways of preserving that level of drama without the chain gang. 

The idea of replay is just fine, even good. It’s the way it’s carried out that sucks. It takes forever. Officials on the field have to wait for the booth review to confirm or overturn the ruling on the field, but there has to be “indisputable video evidence” for a call to be overturned and if there is not, the play stands as called. But in secret we love it, we’re whiners and geeks. We want to have an opinion of the new NFL process-of-the-catch rule and watch a dozen replays in 3D.

So if this is what we want, I challenge football to reinvent itself. To go high tech instead of a weird combination of old school and cutting edge. For instance if a pass was ruled incomplete during a replay, the official has to take extra time to go back and figure out where the previous spot of the ball was and how much time should be on the clock. It makes the replay take a whole lot longer. And while the commentators are watching the replay, they always point out that the officials are seeing exactly the same shots we are seeing. And yet if you pay attention to the complicated rules,  watch the replays and listen to the commentators’ opinions, it’s pretty easy to decide well before the officials what the correct call should be. Either there is an angle that confirms or overturns the call, or there is not. So if the call seems clear but the officials haven’t announced it yet, the commentators can then make the educated guess that they will rule an incomplete pass, but what is taking a long time is going back to figure out the previous spot and time on the clock. But shouldn’t that be instant and automatic? Shouldn’t the clock be overlayed on every replay shot so that this is never an issue? Shouldn’t there be a person in the booth whose sole job it is to say “okay if you’re overturning, the ball should be spotted on the 31 and the clock should read 3:52”. The replay official should never have to hold down the rewind button to figure it out. That’s just lame. 

So they finally finished reviewing a certain play, and now it’s time for the announcement. This is a moment for some serious drama. Everybody waits and watches and then the official says “after further review…” . Hey, I think we all knew he wasn’t going to say “I love hotcakes”. “After further review” is redundant . We know you were reviewing, we all sat here while you did it. Now just make the call. So on the one hand the official says “after further review, the player did not possess the ball through the entire process of the catch, therefore the pass is incomplete. Dallas will be charged a timeout, that is there second charged timeout, it is 4^th down at the 31 yard line, clock operator please reset the clock to 3:52” . 


I just want to eat cheetos and drink beer, not have a civics lessons.

What if instead of that he came out to make the announcement, waited a brief moment to increase the anticipation, and said “INCOMPLETE PASS” and that was all? Or “FIRST DOWN”. The crowd reaction would be tremendous if the official just made the call instead of stating the majority opinion. The officials aren’t wearing black gowns, not yet, so let’s just give the information needed, nothing more. This is how Hockey does it. They have super-limited replay only on goal/no goal situations, they do it really quickly, and the official skates out to center ice, pauses, and signals goal or no-goal. The fan reaction is tremendous. 

Back in football-land, there is also the not-so-secret subtext of the official saying either “the call on the field is confirmed” or “the call on the field stands”. In the first case, this means that there was enough video evidence to confirm the call on the field. In the second case it just means that there was not sufficient video evidence to overturn or confirm it. So what? We don’t need to know the officials’ thought process on making a call. When they call holding during the regular course of play they just say “holding, number 67 offense, 10 yard penalty”. They don’t say “after watching this play in real time number 67 of the offense grabbed number 92 of the defense which constitutes holding, which is a 10 yard penalty”. They just make the call and that’s it. Why do we have to have an explanation made out in the middle of the field of play on a replay? Just make the call and move on. It’s an opportunity to move the game along and actually create more drama.


Every year the NFL rules committee gets together and fine-tunes (read: hair-splits) certain rules, and not one time, ever, have they made things less complicated. They feel an obligation for specificity because the athletes are so good now, and they can do incredible things which require very specific rules to regulate. But at some point they headed down a very slippery slope with replay, and I kind of wish they would figure out that, when it comes to rules, more is not always better.