Expanded Replay

[Cheesehead Craig]

I know it's a touchy subject for many here. I like how the Ravens have gone about this and making moves to get more obvious calls reviewed.

http://espn.go.com/blog/nflnation/post/_/id/204194/ravens-want-nfl-to-answer-why-not-fix-obvious-officiating-errors

It's going to happen that more and more (non)calls are going to be reviewed given this era of 45 camera angles, HDTV and ultra slow motion. I'd vote for implementing it all at once instead of the bit by bit that the NFL wants to do. It's better to just jump into the pool rather than be a wuss and dip your toes in.

The NFL needs to do a lot of work with officiating. Full-time officials and faster replay time review are just some of what needs to be done in conjunction with this.

They make too much money for this to still be as big of an issue as it is.

[pbmax]

I would like to state here, for the record, the insanity of people's approach to replay review.

Originally, everyone was worried about the delays to the game. The reason the challenge flag exists is to give coaches an incentive not to challenge everything and turn football into double switching, manager/ump arguing, mound conferencing baseball.

Slowly, media (mostly) realized that people could deal with delays, but could be lathered into a foam about un-reviewable calls. That soon morphed into outrage that bad calls were being allowed to stand. Happened in football. Happening in baseball, will happen in basketball. It helped that you could sell more ads with 2-4 more official timeouts per game.

Latest iteration is the replay inspired changes to the definition of a catch.

Now the Ravens want more reviewable.

Can we please save the trouble of going through this every 3 years and either make everything reviewable. Or nothing?

[mraynrand]

It would be far easier to have football just be an automated Madden game where both teams are played by the computer. No calls would ever be blown and the only thing to review would be the player talent settings and random number generators. Exciting!