Rowdy
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- Mar 18, 2019
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Replay review for pass interference is dead. That’s been firmly established.
But here’s the lingering question: What will the league use to avoid another Rams-Saints NFC Championship debacle?
“There’s options that we’re going to be reviewing,” Cowboys exec and Competition Committee member Stephen Jones told #PFTPM on Friday. “[W]hat we don’t want to do is make a decision that does have unintended consequences that aren’t in the best interest of the game. We know we got a great game. . . . There’s certainly some solutions that I think moving forward can make our game better. We’ll focus on those. We’ll hopefully get into a situation sooner than later where we can continue business as usual in the future where can really vet these and vet all the unintended consequences that may come along with these solutions.”
The owners will meet in virtual fashion on May 19. At that time they definitely won’t be extending replay review for pass interference for another year, and Jones is OK with that.
“I’m certainly on board that we needed to move away from what we did last year,” Jones said. “These officials do a great job. They’re not gonna be perfect. This game’s fast moving. But overall they do a great job. We need to support them. Hopefully, we won’t have that type of situation again but we will look at solutions moving forward.”
Absent something like Sky Judge or a similar device for fixing an egregious error immediately, the league will be running the risk of another horrible outcome that creates a major controversy. With legalized gambling spreading (the spread could accelerate as the various states try to rebuild their budgets post-pandemic), the next bad-call controversy could be the one that prompts politicians to do political things, and/or prosecutors to do prosecutorial things. So it’s in the league’s best interest to have a system that works.
The last system didn’t. While some blame execution of the replay-review function when it comes to interference calls, Jones said he thinks that the concept simply doesn’t work when it comes to pass interference.
“It’s just the subjectivity that comes with what is what isn’t pass interference and being consistent with it,” Jones said. “I think that’s the hard part is the consistency that every coach wants, that our owners want, that our fans want. Everyone wants consistency. These guys are great athletes. There’s a lot of hand fighting on every play. I think our fans like to see our players play. They don’t want to see a lot of flags. I just think it was very difficult on judgment calls to really get down and have that be part of replay.”
Whatever the reason, the one-year experiment didn’t work. Soon, we’ll find out whether the NFL will have a new experiment, or whether the league will simply hope that there’s no repeat of Rams-Saints until the folks charged with making these decisions have retired.