After further review, light the college football replay-review rules on fire
Take the NCAA’s version of instant replay review and light it on fire. Put it on an ice floe and send it out into the Bering Sea. There’s no fixing it. There’s no saving it. It’s a pox on college sports and it must be stopped.
We’re going to waste hours — days, cumulatively, over the course of a season — grinding down frame-by-frame on the dumbest, most inconsequential plays, but we’re not going to stop and look at a contested catch that may have decided Saturday night’s Duke-North Carolina game long before the second overtime?
What’s the point?
Shut it down. Burn it down. Send the replay officials home and save their game fees. Live with the calls on the field, for better or worse. The entire process has become a mockery of what it’s supposed to be.
Whether the ruling on the field that it was a North Carolina catch, presumably by simultaneous possession, when Duke’s Josh Pickett wrestled the ball away from Bryson Nesbit, after Nesbit and Pickett and Chandler Rivers hit the ground fighting for it, was correct or not is almost immaterial.
It was the kind of bang-bang, difficult-to-officiate play at a critical moment in the game that demanded a second look, a massive first-down conversion on 3rd-and-14 at the Duke 4-yard line with just over two minutes to play. And yet it passed without a formal review and the ball was set for play and snapped so quickly, there wasn’t anywhere near enough time to take the close scrutiny it deserved.
It could have been a catch, it could have been incomplete, it could have been a Duke interception — “There’s no f---- way!” Duke coach Mike Elko screamed, when the officials emerged from their conclave and ruled it a catch long after Pickett had run away with the ball — but it called for a second look, even if that second look ended up being something less than incontrovertible.
In the end, given that no lead was ever safe Saturday night, it’s probably facile to say that the Nesbit catch/no-catch going the other way would have decided the game for Duke. Even after the Tar Heels punched it in three plays later, both Duke and North Carolina put points on the board in the final two minutes of regulation to send the game to overtime(s), and it was anyone’s game to win then.
The Tar Heels claimed it when Armani Chatman knocked the ball away from Jalon Calhoun in the end zone on Duke’s final play, securing a 47-45 win and sending North Carolina fans streaming onto the field, the final whipsaw momentum swing in a game overflowing with them. Like a basketball game, there were seven lead changes and three ties and even a buzzer-beater — Noah Burnette’s 43-yard field goal to force overtime with no time on the clock.
But it’s certainly fair to ask why we’re wasting all this time reviewing ticky-tack plays when one that truly matters, one that could have benefited from the process, one that was incredibly difficult to adjudicate in real time with big bodies tumbling to the ground and the ball moving around, is not given the time and effort it warranted.
Replay, even at its best, has morphed into an all-encompassing scourge on the game, occasionally correcting the egregious errors it was designed to fix — although there’s never been anything it can do about the most blatant, irreversible incorrect calls, like N.C. State’s Bryan Underwood (not) stepping out of bounds against Clemson — but mostly dragging college football games that are long enough already into Wagnerian epics with multiple pointless intermissions.
And let’s not get started about college basketball, where eons are spent relitigating out-of-bounds plays that may or may not have grazed a fingertip, or an announcer can call over the officials to show them an angle they didn’t have and get a reversed call re-reversed.
Both basketball and football would be well served to adopt the NFL’s challenge-based system. If a play’s important enough to be reviewed outside of the final two minutes, let one of the coaches make that decision, because it’s hard to justify all the time spent on replays even in the best of circumstances — and impossible to justify if it’s not used when it’s actually needed.
If you’re not going to use the whole dumb process to make sure a critical call like that is actually correct, just get rid of it entirely. Games will move faster. Controversies will fuel debate. Officials are human, like players and coaches. Live with their mistakes, like players and coaches.
After further review, college replay sucks.
Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at tinyurl.com/lukeslatest to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.
Luke DeCock’s Latest: Never miss a column on the Canes, ACC or other Triangle sports
This story was originally published November 12, 2023 at 5:30 AM with the headline "After further review, light the college football replay-review rules on fire."
