Being Right Sucks: Replay Review Makes Sports Worse
“You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole!”
I fucking hate instant replay review. Hate it. There are a lot of reasons for this, from my own thoughts on the ideal aesthetic of sport to simple, profound irritation with the hyperfocus of getting everything Perfectly Right. The cause of replay is fairly obvious; high-definition television and slow-motion and the instant feedback broadcast into our homes letting us know whether the referee or umpire fell on the wrong side of microseconds and millimeters when they made their decision in real time. Technological precision becomes the standard because it is more and more ingrained in our lives and therefore in sports and these things must, in some way, be reconciled with each other. That part is clear enough. But in the actual implementation, sports tried to fix a cracked vase by hitting it with a hammer.
The spiritual ancestor, if not the direct origin point, of modern replay is the photo finish in racing, which itself developed out of the practice of Fully Automatic Time, where the starter literally starts the clock (as opposed to a hand-timer reacting to the starter) and a mechanical apparatus records specific finishing times. FAT was first implemented in the 1928 Olympics and has grown over time to where hand-timing in racing sports is entirely a thing of the past. That’s good! That’s a good thing! That’s technology and the sport working in concert to improve accuracy and ensure equity in the defined boundaries of the game. That’s not “replay review.”
The next step towards the horrific morass we’ve made of sports in the present is the development of the photo finish, as mentioned earlier. The photo finish accomplishes essentially the same goal as FAT, determining to the photographic frame the winner of the race. It started with strip photography in the 1940s and has gotten more and more advanced since that point, what with the advent of digital technology and what have you. But there’s a very specific purpose to these things: accuracy in determining an A or B proposition. Runner A races Runner B and one of them has to cross the line first, and this is the most microscopic level at which we can make this judgement between yes and no. Right in there, that’s the inkling of an idea that creates the rest of the mess, the idea that builds out into what at some point becomes the self-immolation of a sport as an aesthetic. The issue begins with “Who crossed the line first” then ends in the Sports Philosophy 101 question, “What is a line?”
The first example of the blurring of The Line can be seen in the recent implementation of the Video Assistant Referee in soccer (or association football if you feel like being a dick). VAR is helpful to my point in that it attempts to determine offsides calls; that is, the determination of whether or not an offensive player was on the wrong side of the continually moving line drawn across the pitch where the last defender before the goalie is. The effect on the game in practice is to attempt to measure to the microsecond the timing of the player making a break to the open space behind the defense. Did they leave too soon? “Perfect timing” then gets slowed down, zoomed in on, measured to a degree the human eye could never determine. When used to determine a goal, the VAR has a fixed point of yes or no, but on an offsides call, however much we might want to make a claim that line is a defined entity, it moves, and it can move backwards and forwards in perpetuity right up until we decide it must be measured and assessed. There’s a metaphorical element of quantum measure in this: do we want to know somethings’ velocity or its position? Which part of the whole do we want to know with certainty?
The underlying dilemma is always going to be fixed position versus variable position. Goal lines, finish lines, out-of-bounds lines, these are fixed, immutable, specifically defined, one-fucking-hundred percent absolute. The review system in tennis is perfect because it makes a single determination based on fixed points; hell, they should do away with line judges altogether and only use that to determine points. Same thing when baseball uses it to determine fair or foul. Or even football when deciding whether or not the ball broke the plane. These are simple questions with no moving targets. A point in space is in a discrete place or it is not. That is all.
There is only one moving object in those circumstances; the distinction is a simple yes-or-no A-or-B proposition. The offsides example isn’t perfect, since ostensibly there is a defined back line which the players must remain behind but it is illustrative of the larger point, which is the taking of the perpetual judgment call of the referee in real time and reducing it down to its most minute. The Immaculate Reception, one of if not the most iconic play in American football history, is considered by a not insignificant number of people to be a play that would not have held up to the modern replay system, due to the Byzantine definitions of a “catch” the NFL has rolled through over the years. That ball might have touched the ground, not enough people may have touched the ball (the rules of the time required a defender to touch the ball before a second offensive player could catch it to complete a forward pass); it’s hard to know because of the video equipment of the time and Franco Harris not being full in frame when he catches the ball. If the same play happened today, the game would stop for twenty minutes and we might be told that actually, that didn’t happen. Is there an objective truth in there somewhere? Sure, but that Truth might not square with What Happened.
We all knew the second I said “replay review” this was going to end up being about football to some degree and I’ll get to that in a moment, but allow me to address a certain amount of my curmudgeonly leanings for a moment or two by talking about some other sports. Baseballs’ use of replay for safe/out, fair/foul, home run/not isn’t as large a problem, but I would hesitate to say that it improves the game. The same will likely be true if MLB institutes an electronic strike zone. That zone would completely eliminate the art of pitch framing and the ability of players to stretch or shrink the zone through their own performance. Would that make the game worse? I’m not prepared to say it would, but I don’t think it makes it better either. What it certainly would change is the experience of viewing the game, the full aesthetic experience of Baseball.
Basketball uses replay for who-touched-it-last out-of-bounds calls, did-that-buzzer-beater-really-beat-the-buzzer, assessing flagrant fouls, and now block-charge calls. Out-of-bounds and buzzer uses meet my definition of one moving point and one fixed one, but block-charge calls get a lot more nebulous. The call is based on the concepts of “establishing position,” “out-of-control players,” and a valuation of the way players move around the court. These are things that require further definition and, far more importantly, are open to interpretation. The referee’s literal job is to make those interpretations. Review is theoretically about fixing mistakes; practically it only forces that interpretation to hinge on a few frames of video instead of the experience of the referee inside the flow and rhythm of the game.
We didn’t need instant replay in order to piss and moan about referee calls and decisions. People have been doing that for as long as referees have been a thing. And in the cases where the Absolute Truth is unclear, the replay shows you what you want it to. In Super Bowl XL, for all the discussion of the refereeing issues, Seattle fans to this day claim that Ben Roethlisberger did not cross the goal line on a quarterback sneak at the end of the second quarter. Whether or not he did is besides the point; the review official said he did and the fans see the opposite in the film. The proof is there, no matter what you’re trying to prove. The uncertainty makes certain your own biases.
So we’re back to football, the Holy Grail of people like me who want to complain about replay reviews. There are endless situations football will turn to the film on and more crop up every single year, the most recent iteration being the obviously missed pass interference call in the Saints/Rams NFC Championship Game, an error seen as so bad that the league altered the review rules to include PI as a reviewable play, essentially making every single pass play a potentially reviewable occurrence. But the real center of the problem, the real and actual issues in replay boiled down to their essence, are in whether or not the ball was “caught.” A ‘catch’ happens when the player has control of the ball and both their feet touch the ground in bounds and maintains control of the ball going to the ground or makes a football move unless they establish control in the end zone because then it is a touchdown unless the official deems that control was not fully established at any point in the process of completing the catch. Frankly, the league would be better off taking the same stance on catches as the Supreme Court on pornography and just say they know it when they see it. Personally, I think there should be a clause that says it’s a catch if it can be deemed Extremely Cool, no matter what else occurs.
You probably get the point. The endless infiltration and proliferation of slow-motion, high-definition video means now we can see more and more of the specific action during the game and ultimately see more of the details that human eyes and referees with less-than-perfect angles can’t catch. That’s great for fixed points but less good when there are multiple moving targets that have to be accounted for and measured and assessed. Suddenly the very concept of catching a ball has to be litigated, someone has to make a firm distinction about what is and isn’t “acceptable contact,” the properties of a “football move” are to be determined in the court of public opinion.
Despite my disdain for replay review, I have a hard time making a case that it has no place anywhere in sport. But its application to pure judgement calls, like charges in basketball, catches in football, and its potential to be the arbiter of strike zones and the elimination of some of the artistry of baseball, I have a harder time swallowing. There are plenty of things in sport that are hard Yes/No propositions, but to treat every aspect of a game as that firm of a proposition destroys some of the aesthetic that make sports great, worth watching, enjoying, and arguing about. Chasing the dragon that is being Absolutely Correct sucks the soul out of the games we love. Being right isn’t always worth it. Embrace the blurred line, it’s where the most mythic events exist.
Jake Whipple is the cohost of the podcast All Sports Are Bad.
