Football Instant Replay–The NCAA Or The NFL Way?

When you look at football, well many sports for that matter, officiating has come under intense scrutiny this year. It seems more than ever before. So it started a discussion for me the other night about instant replay in football and which way is best, the way the NCAA does it or the NFL’s approach?

Here are my thoughts on it and I’d be interested in what you other football nuts out there think.  I’ll start by sticking my neck out there right way. I prefer the NFL approach and I’ll tell you why in just a moment.

Let me add that I don’t go along with that “keep the human element” part of the game.  If you could realistically eliminate all officiating mistakes, that would be great.  I have coached at the high school level and bad officiating drove me crazy at times.  But to downplay or eliminate the use of instant replay just to keep whatever the “human element” is doesn’t make sense to me.  I think that the mistakes that officials make at the college and professional level of football are just something that football players, coaches, and fans will just have to accept unless they want to really slow the game down.  And I don’t think anyone wants to slow it down that much.

So, in my opinion, we will end up living with a combination of human officials and instant replay. So now let me get to why I prefer the NFL approach to this and we can let the football debate begin.

I believe that the NFL approach to instant replay makes the use of a challenge more of a strategy decision than the NCAA approach of reviewing every play up in the booth.  I really like the idea that the coach has to decide whether to risk a timeout and can’t hope that the officials will proactively take a call under review as can happen at the college level.  And it makes the use of timeouts even more critical.

This was driven home to me recently in a pro football game where a team had to burn a timeout early in the first half due being disorganized on the field.  With about 3 minutes to go in the half, there was a questionable call, but the coach had no timeouts due to burning that first timeout early in the first quarter.  They could have overturned a call and ended up giving up a touchdown as a result. But being out of timeouts, they couldn’t even throw the challenge flag.

That first timeout (and the disorganization that caused it) cost them a critical call late in the first half.   And that puts both strategy and accountability for discipline and/or focus squarely on the coaches shoulders.  Which I love.

So there is a chance to have a critical call overturned if it’s wrong, but not if you have hurt yourself in other ways earlier in a particular half.

So there’s my argument. No system will end up being perfect, but currently, I like the NFL use of instant replay the best.  Football fans, what do you think.