The Problem with Instant Replay or Ehh, Let’s Give the Patriots a Break. They Deserve One.

Often in my life, I’ve been asked by my mother why I like sports. The teams I root for, the Mets and the Jets, have done nothing but disappoint me at every step of my life. I was born in 1987, the year after the Mets won the World Series. Since then, they’ve given me 2 World Series Losses, 3 additional playoff berths, and mounds of disappointment, career altering injuries, managerial dysfunction (or MD. Too bad Cialis doesn’t have a pill for that¹.*). Hell, just a few months ago, Darryl Strawberry admitted to having sex in the dugout between innings. Not only is that depressing, it’s not even worth admitting. No, I’m not talking about the shame of having sex during your job; I’d be more embarrassed about telling the world you only last 90 seconds. I know Cocaine is a hell of a drug, but c’mon Darryl, act like you’ve been there before.

The Jets of course have been no prized Franchise either. Other than several fluke AFC Title runs under Sexy Rex Ryan, the Jets have done nothing of consequence other than win just enough games to get a bad draft pick, or lose just enough games to miss the playoffs. In the 2 best seasons the Jets have had since 2000, they won 4 playoff games. Tom Brady, has won 5 super bowls. It’s a good thing that Math wasn’t my best subject in school. Perhaps the Sam Darnold era will work out, but based on their history, I’m going to remain cautiously optimistic. This is a team that tried to sell us Christian Hackenberg just a year ago, and now is trying to pretend is never existed.

I mean, there’s been worse puns

So when my mother asks me why I’m so into sports, it’s a fair question. There’s not a lot to like based on the teams I root for. Perhaps I’m just a masochist. It would explain so very much. But I think there’s a lot of fun in rooting for a team, no matter how sad sacks of shits the franchises you saddled yourself with may be. Sports allow us to escape our real world problems – whether they be financial, social or a tweet from @POTUS, we can shut our minds off and just watch two teams give it their all. And when they don’t give it their all, we can complain about who kneeled during the National Anthem, who’s overpaid, and which players are the biggest assholes. It’s a win win.

That, is actually why I think a lot of people like sports. It’s fun to argue, but a lot of times, there’s a clear side that’s right. In sports, arguments can be made from a variety of angles. While a typical sports argument often has a definitive answer (Tom Brady is better than Christian Hackinbust for example), there’s a ton of ways to tackle what team is better. Sports isn’t just about the current game. They’re about the future of the current, the next one, and the following decade. Do you think fans of the 76ers want to discuss the 2014 season? Of course not! Now they have two of the 20 best players in the league, and a change to go to the finals for the right to get swept by a superior Western Conference time if their very injury prone players stay healthy**². The point is, with sports, there’s always a glimmer of hope that a draft pick, or a player can turn things around.

Except for the Browns. Just… just stop it. I mean, sure, if you want Baker Mayfield, go ahead and do it, but don’t get a cornerback when the second pass rusher you desperate need is there for you. I mean, who’s in the draft room making those decisions?

Oh, there’s a former front office Member of the New York Mets there? Ok, then the decisions make sense. Carry on.

Because of the unique nature of sports, we can’t even get that attached to one player. Sure, Joe Touchdown might be your favorite player right now, but when he gets cut for his 5^th DUI in May and signs with the Bengals***³., do your loyalties lay with the jackass, or with the team he used to play for? Most people, and I’d say as high as 99 out of 100, will stick with their team. Fans root for colorful laundry and little else. No matter how much a player on another team may have tortured them in the past, the minute he or she puts on your team’s colors, they are welcomed in open arms. And if that players leaves to sign with your rival? The irrational hatred returns. Being a fan makes no sense.

You know all the people who boo and bash Colin Kaepernick would immediately forget if he threw three TD passes for their team. I’m not looking to get political here, but it’s true. We root for damn laundry, and we can’t get enough of it.

While sports fans will argue that their team is the best until they are blue in the face, and will never concede even the smallest points, there is one topic all fans can agree on. Professional Refs are the worst. Whether it’s a baseball umpire, NBA official, or NFL line judge, there’s never been a fan alive who’s thought the refs were doing an adequate job. All fans will agree that the refs in any game give all the favorable calls to the opposition. Nobody sober off a professional league’s payroll have ever believed in their heart that a single ref has done a passable job.

One could argue that refs have the toughest job in entertainment. When they are actually doing their jobs well, nobody notices them, or gives them credit. Only when there is controversy does a ref prove to be visible. Refs are forced to make judgement calls on athletic plays many of us cannot follow in real time. They must do this while keeping an encyclopedia of rules in mind. They also must balance this with a hostile crowd, and sometimes must make the unpopular call against the home team. These decisions are made against people significantly more rich and famous than them. These men are three times as strong and fast as the refs, and if it push came to shove would use any of the officials as a toothpick.

Shouldn’t we consider the plight of these brave men and give them a break if they make a wrong call?

Are you shitting me? Of course not. Refs sucks.

Professional refs have never proven to have an iota of competence. They regularly blow even the simplest of calls. Home Plate umpires change the strike zone within the same pitch sequence, let alone a game. NFL Refs don’t understand what constitutes a catch. In the NHL, pucks actually go off the refs pretty regularly, and I couldn’t tell you how they decide what penalties they call. I assume it’s via coin flips and dice rolls. The NBA believes in superstar calls – an admitted fact of the league, where the best players get the benefit of the doubt over role players on any whistle. Or, and they also had a scandal where a ref admitted to point shaving. That’s not good.

This goes beyond professional refs – amateur refs suck the same too. When I was playing basketball in the 4^th grade, there was a ref who outright told us he would favor us in games to help us out. Now, we weren’t very good, and probably needed the help, but I don’t think a ref should be thinking this way. He definitely shouldn’t be telling us this. For the record, our ref didn’t help us win any games that season. We were the Detroit Lions before they went winless, and this is with a ref in our pocket. God, were we terrible.

The professional sports leagues needed a way to avoid refs screwing up pivotal moments. Imagine a marquee game being ruined due to a bad call. Ok, you’re totally thinking of the dozens of playoff games that were decided by the ref blowing (or not blowing) a whistle. A lot of the classic ref blunders in crucial games occurred before the social media age. Man were those refs lucky. Could you imagine the league’s embarrassment if a ref made a dumbass call and had to deal with millions of tweets informing of this. Remember when Jim Joyce, an MLB ump, blew a pitcher’s no hitter with an atrocious safe call on an infield grounder? That was before social media and that was everywhere. If that happened today, he’d have to resign, immediately and 100,000 Tigers fans would have told him to do unrepeatable actions with various penises****⁴.

Fully admitting their refs sucked, leagues slowly began to allow for call reviews. Usually limited to a handful a game, coaches and managers could challenge the rulings in games and hope to overturn the call. This was first rolled out in football, but is used in hockey and baseball as well. Basketball uses a modified system that refs can review several situations, but there are no challenges. All leagues have a central location where a team of experts, usually former refs who also would have blown the call, decide on the correct ruling.

I will admit, at first, I thought this was brilliant. The idea behind the review was to make sure big plays were called correctly. Reviews were limited, but happened swiftly. There were a few times where challenges swung games, and other times where the coaches demanding a review were absolutely wrong. But this brought a fresh new layer to the game. We didn’t mind a two minute stoppage if it meant our team was getting the justice they deserved. The ref lost their ability to screw us – though our own coaches now had even more chances to botch games beyond shitty play calls and poor substitutions.

The longer replay reviews became a thing, the worse the coaches decisions became. Weaker coaches, often Andy Reid, challenged boneheaded plays for no reason, trading their trump cards for several extra yards on a second down in the first quarter. They would lose their ability to challenge calls at the end of the game and put the tense moments in the hands of the refs again. Baseball challenges took exceedingly long, and ruined pitcher rhythms. More than any sport, baseball is a rhythm game, and this slowed an already slow game.

Leagues also added more times where headquarters’ would automatically review a play. The NBA has nearly every questionable out of boards call or hard foul reviewed, taking upwards of five minutes a time. Football has allowed for auto reviews on every touchdown or turnover, the two most important results in the game. Now, coaches can use challenges loosely since there’s no repercussions. What was once a chess piece for coaches is now meaningless. This also slows down the game drastically, to the point where you want to watch something else. Reviews have gotten to the point where they are actively hurting the product.

Probably the worst result of the replay is that leagues are so afraid of getting the call wrong, that even when they get the call right, they manage to get it wrong. I know that sentence makes no sense, but let me try again. Replays are now slowed down to 1/1000^th of a second, which was never the intent of the addition. Replays were supposed to overturned calls with indisputable evidence. If you have to slow down a review to 1/1000^th of a second, that’s not indisputable, that’s a conspiracy theory. I mean, if you stare at an image that long, you can probably see bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster in the background as well.

In the 2017 NLDS, Bryce Harper was called out because he was off the base and tagged out. To the naked eye, this didn’t happen. However on a freeze frame, he was off the base for a split second and a tag was applied. Is the call right? Technically, yes. However, there’s no way this is the intent of replay. Freeze Framing shouldn’t determine a team’s fate, and I say this as a person who fist pumped the Nationals’ loss. They got screwed, and if the game happened ten years ago, they likely win and there is only mild questioning of the call from Cubs fans that nobody takes seriously.

There’s also the issue that after all of these freeze frames, slow downs and camera angles, the refs still get the call wrong. In last year’s week 12 Jets Vs Pats game, the Jets’ Austin Seferrian Jenkins caught a pass, bobbled it for half a second, and then crossed the end zone with full possession. As now every scoring play is reviewed, the play was reviewed as a catch for nearly 10 minutes. Every sensible fan, so this excludes all of New England, assumed this was a TD, or at worse, maybe a no catch, which would have been an atrocious decisions. Instead, the refs called it a fumble out of the endzone and gave the Pats possession. Somehow, they added a third possibility. Remember, Jenkins had full possession when he crossed the endzone. He never dropped the ball.

No, they didn’t say “Pysch!” afterwards.

Similarly, in the biggest game of the AFC’s regular season, the Steelers’ TE, Road Dogg Jessie James, caught a TD pass that would have put the Steelers up four after the extra point. However, upon review, James’ hands moved a bit and the ball may have hit the ground without a hand underneath. This was a much closer call than the Jenkins catch, but from a live, full speed replay, there’s no way it can be overturned. I’m sure you can guess what the refs ruled.

They ruled it incomplete in case you didn’t know.

These reviews have led me to two conclusions. Firstly, I don’t think the NFL refs know the rules, or certainly know common sense. If a review takes more than two minutes, there’s not conclusive evidence. The refs must actually be googling the rule book to figure out what’s the correct call. Both of these call helped shape the game, and honestly, shouldn’t have been overturned based on the spirit of the rules.

Secondly, I’m not one to think of conspiracies*****⁵*****It’s actually the only thing I’m good at./note], but go figure the Patriots were the beneficiaries of both of these questionable calls. Now, I’m not going to say the league is favoring the Patriots, as that would be crazy. It’s not like they were the beneficiaries of a clear fumble in 2001 that became known as the tuck rule and shaped the next 15 years for the franchise, and therefore the league. And it’s not like they’re been fined for spying on other team’s practices, or illegally deflated footballs to give their QB an advantage. No, Bill Belechick is the epitome of class and following the rules.

If the Hoodie fits….

I think the most telling part of replay reviews was when CBS signed Mike Carey as their review correspondent. Carey was an atrocious ref who often make laughable calls. He was at least 60% of the reason they were forced to review calls. During every review, Carey would give his opinion, and get it wrong well above his 60% line. His explanations were bad, and when he was proven wrong, he would act like he was correct the whole time. It was shameless. His predictions got so bad, during the Carolina/Broncos super bowl, there was a prop that Mike Carey would get a challenge call wrong. Naturally, he got a call wrong in the first five minutes of the game. Vegas lost millions and Carey did not speak for the rest of the game. He was fired seconds after the broadcast. Not only was his entire era embarrassing, it brought the attention back on the refs being terrible.

My solution to all this? Let’s scale back the reviews. I think we should go back to only having one or two challenges a game in all sports. There really shouldn’t be freebies. If the refs are really the best in the business, they shouldn’t be screwing up that much. This will stop coaches from stupidly wasting their challenges before the second half. Except Andy Reid of course. While getting the call right does mater, this puts more pressure on the refs to get calls right the first time and more pressure on the coaches to be good at their jobs.

Also, and probably more importantly, there should be no more of this slow down the replay trend. I understand going at half speed, but even that is against the spirit of the rule. How is slowing down to 1/20000^th of a second indisputable evidence? If refs can’t make a concrete decision at real speed, they shouldn’t be allowed to change the game on a freeze frame. I don’t understand why this isn’t a bigger deal to people. I mean, that would change so many reviews, and the only calls getting reviewed would be the very worst. So, again, 60% of Mike Carey’s.

Carey attempting to count the men on the field

Somewhere along the lines, reviews went from improving accuracy in big moments of the game, to being a catch all of any potential problems. I mean, did we really need to bail out Mike Carey, or just get competent refs? Games are long enough as they are – I don’t need to lose an extra 20 minutes every time I sit down to watch the Mets choke away another 9^th inning lead. We should be trying to speed games up, not make them torturous. How else I’m supposed to get my girlfriend to tolerate the sports I like if I have to justify 10 minutes of stoppage, and then 10 minutes of cheerleader shots?

Leagues, get your shit together and fix this. I pretty much gave you a free solution. Feel free to add me to a committee to solve things like this.

Also if you keep the cheerleader shots in, I don’t think most people will complain.

1. *Imagine seeing the Wilpons holding hands in separate bath tubs outside?
2. **There’s a good chance Joel Embiid broke a bone when I wrote the sentence.
3. ***Joe “DUI” Touchdown would totally sign with the Bengals. They require jail experience for all their signings.
4. ****Apparently, the plural of penis is not peni or penii as I believe it should be.