Death to Replay
I hate replay in sports. I have since it was first implemented and probably will until I die. The earliest memory I have of replay making a big impact on a game was during a New England Patriots playoff game, the so-called “Snow Game” or “Tuck Rule Game”. That second nickname is all about the replay. In the game, the New England quarterback seemed to fumble the ball, essentially giving their opponents the victory. Ah, but wait!
As a Patriots fan, I was not all that upset by the outcome. It was beyond ridiculous and an obvious overextension of the rule but it gave my team the victory. This was a pivotal moment for the franchise as it was the launching pad for the Belichick-Brady Dynasty. You’d think it would make me LOVE replay even more. Nope.
My strongest feelings toward replay have to do with its use in professional soccer. Up until last season, the Premier League had abstained from using it. But, like every other sport, they eventually caved and instituted something called VAR (video assistant referee), and let me tell you - it sucks. Everything that people worried about happening, happened.
I don’t remember the last time I spontaneously enjoyed a goal. With every score, a waiting game begins. Not just for the fans, the players too. Here’s the dance: goal scored, check the flagman, check the ref, celebrate a little but stare at the video board the whole time, wait, wait, and then either a) celebrate, or b) get ready to stand around longer while someone, somewhere, watches every blade of grass to ensure integrity.
Does this sound like fun? Have we lost the goddamn point of playing sports in the first place?
What does replay solve?
Ostensibly, the idea behind replay is to right unjust wrongs. If a player was granted favor outside of the allowed rules then it is only fair for that to be corrected. If a linesman misses an offside call and an attacker gets a step or two on the defense, they have a much better chance of scoring than they would otherwise. It doesn’t mean they will, it only increases the chances they do. To remedy this, the logical thing to do would be to stop play at the point of the foul and go from there. All of this makes sense in a vacuum. And if you’ve ever been a competitor screwed out of a victory by some bullshit, you know how infuriating this feeling can be. How can a referee or umpire miss something so blatant and obvious that literally everyone on the field saw it?
Simple. They’re human. Replay tries to cure the fallibility of humans. It’s an attempt to steal a power from the gods, to slow down time, and relitigate moments from the past in order to secure a more “just” outcome. It’s a noble pursuit, for sure, and probably the most direct way to solve the problem of bad refereeing. But with many things, what makes sense in theory becomes nonsensical in practice.
Part of the reason this happens is that adding replay to games exchanges some foundational elements of participating in live sports (both as a fan and a competitor) like flow and spontaneity. If you were to ask 100 people why they watch sports and support their teams, “excellent refereeing” would probably never be listed. And this is with decades of replay available. We watch sports and play sports because it is a human thing to do. We enjoy the competition, the tribal nature of battle, the physical challenge, and superhuman abilities the athletes have. We love seeing them excel — and fail as well. It is through one team’s failure that another achieves victory. We accept that humans are imperfect and most artists will tell you that’s what makes for beauty: imperfection.
Why not replay everything, if we’re correcting for humanity? Miss an easy shot a child could have scored? REPLAY. Foul someone by accident? No worries, REPLAY. With technology, we can ensure that there is never another human accident again. Is this a ridiculous extension of VAR? Yes, of course, I’m being hyperbolic to make a point. But there’s an illusion that the officials are somehow outside of the game and that they can be tinkered with. That by altering their responsibility and authority on the pitch it won’t have far-reaching consequences.
One of my biggest issues with replay is that it often assumes (and thereby favors) an imagined outcome. He would have scored. He would have stopped it. He would have caught it. We make an assumption of reality and then attempt to create a penalty or advantage to balance it out. Everything is a judgment call one way or another. Hopefully, at the professional level, the sports leagues take enough ownership and responsibilities for their officials that they don’t miss obvious calls in the first place. Instead of solving the problem of on-field officials making mistakes, we’ve now outsourced that to men in booths.
And they don’t seem to be much better at making decisions. I can’t tell you how many times a soccer match has ground to halt as we watch some man align little blue and yellow and red lines to find out player X was two-thirds of an inch offside. It’s ridiculous. Imagine if you’re a team that gets screwed BY replay? Meaning the call was right in the first place and replay overturned it. It’s happened. Many times. And even one incorrect call from VAR is too many. Again, what problem are we trying to solve?
Is it worth it?
This is really the question sports fans have to ask themselves. Are all the stoppages in time, all the standing around and commercial breaks (******coming back to this), and nonsense worth it? Some people would say it is. They would say that overall, the time isn’t that much (usually a minute or two) and that it’s important to get the call RIGHT. But what makes a call RIGHT? That it is the absolute letter of the rulebook? You say how that played out in snowy New England. At some point, you have to accept that as long as we have humans designing games and playing games, human failings will always be a part of them.
Umpires will always have different strike zones. They could easily be replaced by technology that creates the same strike zone for every batter. Imagine how much better pitchers could be if they were always throwing at the exact same target? But isn’t part of the charm of baseball that the umpires have different ideas of what a “strike” is? Or in soccer, what constitutes a yellow card vs. no booking? If we are going to embrace replay then I saw we go full bore and take refs completely off the pitch. Let’s just have all the officiating done from a booth. There will be no fan influence, no coaches bitching, no players bitching, plus they’ll have access to 10 angles and replays. On the field, we’ll have a little robot thing that lights up and sounds an alert when a foul has been found. Sounds great, right?
I like that there is humanity in sports. It is one of the few places left that hasn’t been turned completely reliant upon technology. Someday, we may watch robots play baseball. And maybe that will be fun. But it won’t be the same. It’s bad enough that every time something happens, the first thing everyone at home and in the stadium does it look for a replay. Even if there isn’t an official challenge. Usually, they miss it because they’re on their phones, watching a replay.
This might just be me, but I prefer spontaneity. I like that when something happens, it matters. I liked being able to celebrate every time Man City scored without having to stand around waiting to make sure there wasn’t a VAR challenge. Did that mean we got screwed a few times in the process? Sure. But everyone took their lumps. There were controversies, to be sure, but it’s not like VAR and replay have solved those. If anything, they’ve only intensified the debate because refs, with the aid of video replay, should now be PERFECT. That is, after all, the reason we’ve told we’re doing this. Definitely not the extra commercial money. It’s to GET IT RIGHT. And yet, they continue to fail.
Let’s also keep in mind that in most sports, what can be reviewed is limited and how often things can be reviewed is restricted. In football, coaches are allowed a certain number of challenges. Use them all up and too bad. So, you can see it really isn’t about “getting it right”. It’s about getting it right within a narrow set of circumstances. This also doesn’t account for what it does to the official’s authority on-field. Watch what happens after a goal or foul. Every player is out there point and making a replay gesture. Some leagues have even gone so far as to ban the players from doing so. The refs also must endure a kind of psychological neutering, knowing that the calls they make can be challenged.
To recap: we are trying to solve the fallibility of humans and reduce controversy by broadly implementing a narrowly focused set of rules, applicable at random times, that allow unseen officials to change the past and thus create newer controversy. Got it. Lord knows that’s why I played sports. All the RIGHTNESS of it. I ask again, is it worth it?
I get that there is an element of fairness in all this. And if replay could be implemented in a way that it’s barely noticeable, then perhaps it could work. But it is foolhardy to think that you will ever eliminate humanity from sports. The refs do not exist outside of the sport. They are as much a part of it as the players. Our efforts should be in making better officials, not ways to undermine and perfect them. Year-round employment, in-depth training requirements, and constant evaluations are only the beginning.
Save your money on cameras and TVs. Invest in people. Without them, sports wouldn’t be worth it.