We all want referees to be as accurate and impartial as possible. No one wants to see bad call after bad call from either a neutral perspective or as a fan of the team against whom the failures to correctly interpret and apply the rules of the game are levied (although, I will admit that I do not complain when calls go against the opponents of my favorite teams). However, the integrity of every sport would be vastly improved.

With that being said, instant replay has not proved to be a valid answer to the questions asked of on-field refereeing decisions. There are multiple explanations for why I believe instant replay is as detrimental as it is beneficial, and these are discussed below:

Instant Replay Does Not Help Judgment Calls

How many rules in sports are left up to the interpretation of the referees? I can list a plethora, but some of the big ones are as follows:

When one of these issues arises that cannot be measured objectively (unlike the soccer ball crossing the goal line causing the referee’s watch to vibrate), to what extent is it even helpful to review it on replay? With the occasional exception in which clear and obvious errors become apparent, judgment calls are not going to be helped by watching the play again, especially in slow-motion, a concept that magnifies every act of contact between the player and the ball/puck/other players to the point where everything looks to be blatant. Slow-motion replays do not accurately reflect the impact of a specific moment during the play on the greater scheme, at least in my opinion. In fact, I find these to be deceiving. Take defensive pass-interference, for example. In real time, contact between the defensive back and wide receiver may appear to coincide with the ball arriving. However, upon slowing the play down to 0.25x speed, it looks as though the defensive back was quite early. The DB often was not early, it just appears that way when you look at fractions of a second. To me, instant replay is deceptive in many of its capacities, and its use to change calls on the field/pitch/ice should be limited to events that are so incredibly obvious that Ray Charles can see it—but that is also open to interpretation.

Reviewing Plays Kills the Momentum of the Game

This is something that mainly applies to hockey and soccer, but can also be seen in football. In soccer, the institution of the video assistant referee (VAR) has been the subject of immense controversy. This is due in part to the aforementioned handball rule, something so subject to interpretation that it seems that even the referees themselves do not know what qualifies as a handball and what does not. But the larger problem—at least in my estimation—lies in the checking for offsides. For those who do not watch (or even care about) soccer, the offsides rule states that, when a pass leaves the passer’s foot, the recipient cannot have a body part that can legally be involved in scoring a goal (everything except the arms and shoulders) beyond the last defender’s trailing foot. Does that sound complicated enough? It gets more complex. When goals are checked for offsides, VAR draws these incredibly narrow, almost one-dimensional lines across the field—one emanating from the attacking player’s furthest-forward body part, the other from the defender’s trailing foot—and lines them up to see whether the former is ahead of the latter. If it is, the play is ruled offsides. 

As painstakingly close as those plays can get, my issue is not so much with the drawing of the lines—accuracy is important—but with the roller coaster of emotions that occur on a goal being called back. It has gotten to the point where players cannot even celebrate goals without looking over their shoulder to see if the replay officials will decide to check the goal. As much as accuracy is valuable, is being too accurate hurting the sport?

The same thing applies in hockey. Are we going to get to a point where a triple-overtime goal is scored in game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals—after which there would doubtlessly be a massive celebration from the winning team and a colossal disappointment for the losing side—gets overturned because the center slightly brushed against the goaltender’s left pad as the wrist shot went over his glove? How would either team go on and continue playing the game after such an emotional moment were to be overturned? Replay reviews KILL the products that the leagues put on. They slow down the game, they are inconclusive half the time anyways, and they decimate the emotional component of the sports

There are other components of replay that I find ridiculous (e.g., the things that cannot be reviewed such as forward progress, roughing the passer, etc.) but I do not want to turn this into an anti-referee manifesto. The bottom line is that video replay—in my estimation—has done just as much, if not more harm than good. Also, the Steelers won so I am in a relatively good mood.

Thanks for reading!