Instant replay needs to go

Sunday, November 02, 2003

By Ed Bouchette, Post-Gazette Sports Writer

The use of instant replay to correct calls in the NFL will itself be challenged at the meetings next March, when it can be snuffed out by just nine of the league's 32 owners.

It should go the way of the leather helmet.

The league is no better with instant replay than it was without it, and may be worse off. Its use is limited in its scope and many obvious incorrect calls go overturned either because the coaches cannot challenge them, the referee cannot detect indisputable evidence while reviewing the tape to overturn it or the ref merely blows the replay call.

It can be voted out because this version expires after this season and three-fourths of the 32 owners need to approve of it again.

Steelers coach Bill Cowher supports the system and points to one play, the final one of the 1995 AFC championship game in Three Rivers Stadium, as an example to keep it. The Colts threw a Hail Mary pass that fell incomplete in the end zone, but for one stunning moment it appeared that it was caught. With no replay in use that season, if the officials had ruled it a catch, the wrong team would have gone to the Super Bowl.

"I think it would be foolish to do away with it," Cowher said. "I go back to our championship game, to where if that call was changed to a completed pass and we were denied a right to go to the Super Bowl because the right call was not made and we have a system that we have used ... to do away with it because of a few flaws would be an overreaction to what the system was put in for."

Too bad if the wrong team went. Those are the breaks.

The New York Yankees may have won an American League pennant against Baltimore because a fan reached over the right-field fence and caught a ball that would have been caught by an Orioles outfielder. The umpires ruled it a Yankees home run.

Did anyone then call for replay to be used in baseball, or at least in the baseball postseason?

Not many have called for instant replay to be used in college football. Has that game suffered in any way because of it?

Baltimore coach Brian Billick railed against replay after his team's game last week because of what he called misuses of it, bringing the issue to the forefront again. Colts coach Tony Dungy hates it.

Mike Brown, the Bengals' president and general manager, long has been replay's most vocal opponent among the owners.

"I don't like the delays. I think a lot of the calls are too close to tell one way or the other," Brown said. "I don't like the selectivity -- do you review this or not that when both are factors in the game?

"To me, the overriding thing is the delays, something we have too much of anyway. Maybe we should be looking not to add to those but to cut them back. On TV, it's entertaining because it's back and forth and people seem to focus in on it. The American public likes court decisions, the public is fascinated with litigation and this is our version of it. On TV it comes across fairly well, but not because it's part of the game. It's a game within a game.

"They don't always get them right no matter what they do. I think that will always be so. Human beings make mistakes. I don't have a problem living with an on-field decision that's quick and you go on. It evens out over time."

Dan Rooney, once a staunch resister of instant replay, is resigned to having it around because "it's almost an institution now."

E-mail this story   Print this story