The National Football League adopted limited use of instant replay in 1986, but today twenty years later, its still not perfect. No where was it more apparent than in the NFL divisional playoff game between Pittsburgh and Indianapolis.
The call proved to be grossly inaccurate: “After reviewing the play, the defender caught the ball, lost it prior to getting his knee off the ground, therefore, its an incomplete pass,” announced Pete Morelli.
But the NFL said his review was wrong, and the initial call on the field was right.
In College, the American Football coaches association is surveying their members this month, to see if they prefer to keep it their way, or adopted the NFL method.
Charlie Weiss, the Head Coach at Notre Dame says, “The one thing about being in the NFL, you knew that he rules were going to be the same, every week, and I think that would be a good thing for college football, if the rules were the same every week.”
Joe Paterno, Head Coach at Penn State, likes the idea. “I think the replay is a good deal, now whether is perfect right now, whether we ought to have a red flag, from the coaches, I've been against that,” he says.
In College system is not based on challenges by the coaches can cost timeouts. Unlike the NFL, there are unlimited replays, all determined by an official in the booth. It began as an experiment in the Big 10 2-years ago.
Says Ohio State Head Coach Jim Tressel, “There’s some pros and cons to it if you’re going to have it. You know our Big 10 model, which was adopted by the rest of the country this year, I think Its as good as perhaps you can get. I'm kind of old fashioned, and believe in the human part of the game, and if they changed over every mistake I made as a coach, they'd be stopping every play. So I don't know, the jury is probably still out in my mind, do we really need replay
Paterno remains in support, saying “Basically, all we want to do is we want the kids to win the game, you don't want the officials to lose the game, that’s not it, and the officials don't want to lose the game, but we put them in positions sometimes where its impossible for them to be on top of every play, its too wide open.
In this year's national championship game between Texas and Southern Cal, Texas would have lost an interception by Michael Griffin, if the instant replay booth had not stepped in. But later, a monitor malfunction kept officials from seeing a replay when Vince Young's knee was down on a lateral that lead to a touchdown. This turned out to be a technical meltdown, not a fault of the system.
Says Texas Head Coach Mack Brown, “I'd like to see us tweak it. I'd like to see us all do the exact same thing, but i thought it was an overwhelming success with a few glitches. And we used to talk about the officials making a mistake, and now we talked about one where the review maybe didn't look like it should have instead of four calls that officials made to lose the game, but I thought it took a tremendous amount of press off the officials.”
“All you want in a game is a fair fight,” says TCU Head Coach Gary Patterson. “I think that's all coaches want, that it doesn't come down to some bit technicality, of where something happened where there was a fifth down or something, where you didn't have control of it, and couldn't stop to review it, and get it right, and I think that's all we're really looking for.”
“You would expect it to ah, improve, and again, realize it was just our first year of using it, its still better than not having it at all I believe, but hopefully we can make it better, says Oklahoma Head Coach Bob Stoops. “There is no question it can be better, and you would think that, you know it’s our first year of everybody using it, that we'll tweak it, try to make some changes, and hopefully improve it.”
During the next few weeks, College Coaches will be trying to decide how to tweak their replay system, but history shows that no matter what they do, no system will be perfect.
No comments:
Post a Comment