Collegiate Instant Replay No Longer Using Your Grandma's TV

Going to HD is a good idea and we must give the SEC credit for trying to correct a problem.  The other leagues should do the same at once.

I am probably not alone among college football fans in my suspicions that Conference officiating is far from objective and tends to be slanted heavily in favor of keeping "marquee" teams in their conferences undefeated as long as possible.

There have been a number of big time coaches who have been victimized and publicly come out and said their have been questionable calls last season (the SEC comes to mind here) and in previous seasons—this has gone on for years with little alternative to change it.

The new rule about "taunting" is a blatant non-reviewable judgement call that any of the officials on the field can feel free to flag and influence the outcome of a game.

There are many others that with or without any HDTV review or not have been invoked to "help" a favorite team get back in a game and even end up winning a game.

Even the reviewed calls have had some very dubious rulings after the multiple camera angles have shown what really happened—the officials still can defy visual proof make their own call or non-call to over rule what an official on the field called.

There needs to be much tougher scrutiny of these officials—last year the same individuals had an unusually large number of bad calls week after week and even having mixed or outside of conference official crewss should be blended to keep htese shenanigans to a minimum or have a chance to counter act them.

Otherwise the same SEC, Big 12, PAC 10, Big Ten teams will be protected and propeled into the bCS scheme every year thanks to helpful officiating. Sounds very contrived and it could actually increase the growing clamour to have a playoff system that includes more deserving teams who have been kept out of the BCS money lately.

Refs make misteaks … we all do. No excuse for the replay officials. But to accuse the conferences of "fixing" the ref decisions is ridiculous. What Arkansas and LSU fans and teams that are on the short end of key miscalls forget are the rest of the calls in the games that may have gone the other way … they never seem to think about them. It is tough to have your team lose a game because of a bad call … but there must be at least half the plays in a football game that require judgement (100 percent when holding is considered) and just that one call does not decide the game.

Collegefootball#1 you nailed it.  The game is starting to get tainted badly.  I’ve noticed to many games in the last five years that had me scratching my head.  Every single time it does seem like the teams benefiting from those calls are high profile teams.  It really sems blatent in the SEC more then anywhere else. 

Then again there are alot of investors (ESPIN, CBS,) that need a good product on the field to increase revenues. 

Enjoy the last days of college footbal because the game is quickly going WWF like the NBA and NFL…

the florida v. arkansas game was crooked officiating and everyone knows it

On the Alabama-LSU Patterson replay, there was no single replay that
was conclusive.  You can’t stitch together 3 or 4 images and say,
"Well, if you combine them, the evidence is pretty clear."  I am NOT
defending the call — I am pointing to an additional problem last
season that seemed to me more problematic than HD in the booth:

Lack of cameras down the sideline and across the goal line.

That issue is sheer budget-cutting, and I saw a lot more plays last
year where Replay Guy is trying to determine what happened on the
sideline or goal line from a mid-field camera angle.  That’s just
begging for trouble in a world of "incontrovertible evidence."

Second Point — The worst example of officiating I saw (by a narrow margin) last season was the Oregon State-USC game.  The refs missed Taylor Mays ripping the helmet (not intentionally, but violently) off a receiver catching a ball in the end zone.  This wasn’t on the back side of a play — again, it was a guy catching a TD pass.

Then, to add an element of farce, they called USC for a blocking below the waist foul on the ensuing kick — PRIOR to USC receiving the ball.  Conveniently enough, that meant OSU got to rekick from the 50 — which would have been the result had they correctly called the Mays personal foul.

In other words, it’s not corruption I worry about, it’s the sheer incompetence, across the board.  Don’t assume it’s just an SEC issue.  It will be your team soon enough.

A simple computer-chip in each end of the football, with a laser wire running down each marker and sideline would solve many issues. However, college football replays are quicker, more thorough, and more often remedied correctly.

I have watched football live since the 60’s, and the officiating has improved, not regressed with each new decade. The reason you hear more about such errors is because of coverage, and many Generation X-er’s who prefer to use the maxim from the only book they have read completely—Chicken Little. "The sky is falling; the sky is falling!"

These same whiners are the ones who claimed JFK was shot from the Grassy Knoll, the Apollo Missions were filmed in Hollywood, no Jews were killed on 9-11 in the Twin Towers because they had been warned, and ‘fire has never in the history of mankind melted steel’: AKA/ The Rosie O’Donnell Mantra of Blatant Idiocy.

Life happens. Deal with it, get over last year’s games, and find something more inequitable to complain about. Maybe you could join PETA and save the snaildarter?

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"Refs make misteaks … we all do."

The irony here is just awesome.

I have been watching college football games since the early sixties myself and after nearly fifty years of watching college officials call games, they have been biased over the course of all of those years and they have become a lot more devious in terms of how they "manage" the  game due to replay and widespread TV coverage.

Not all of the games have officials impacting the games—just the real high profile/high stakes for conference standings/BCS seem to have more than their fair share of game altering calls—

These tend typically to be non-reviewable calls like "excessive celebrations", "roughing the snapper" or "holding/pass interference" which technically can be called on any down an official wants to throw a flag on. 

The SEC was last year’s poster child—quoting the above article:
 

"You probably don’t, however, since you know that the SEC admitted error from the crew that did the Arkansas-Florida game, suspended them, retroactively announced that flags in the Georgia-LSU game were ridiculous, failed to call Terrence Cody for taking his helmet off after he blocked a potentially game-winning Tennessee field goal, gave Florida a phantom touchdown against Mississippi State, and did not give LSU an obvious interception in their game against Alabama. In all of this, SN’s Matt Hayes provided the closest thing to a defense: "SEC officials just bad, not crooked." A ringing endorsement, that. "

I don’t think there are any "conspiracy" theories here—you only have to watch the games and replays to realize what is going on.

The evidence of officials influencing the outcome of big games goes on for pages and covers many years of officiating in all of the big conferences—BIG 10, SEC, Big 12, PAC 10, ACC, Big East.

Ask coaches like Joe Paterno about how PSU had been treated as a new comer to the BIG 10—He refused to talk to reporters for two weeks and hung an Official Doll by its neck from his front door of his house.

How dare new kid PSU upstage UofM or OSU in the BIG Ten Conference race?

Going way back to 1964—Ara Parseghian of Notre Dame wrote in his book Resurrection about the PAC 8 officials who "stole" the last game of their undefeated season against USC with 5 "mysterious" calls by the officials that decided the game. Parseghian remembered and beat USC by 50+ points in their next visit to the Colesium.

The agenda is to help and protect the key conference programs in big decisive games by flags and rulings by officials.

It’s been that way for a long time and has been updated with new tricks and "give back" calls on the next play or two to make it look like the officials are evening the score with the yellow flags—but the damage has already been done.

Pollyanna was another popular kid book where "oh, everything is OK and going to be fine" was the mode that she operated in—but that’s not the way things really work.

College Coaches, players and fans know when a game is being twisted to an agenda by the officials and I think there has been a lot of over due publicity lately about it and there will be some changes to keep fans and coaches from causing further problems.

Why do you think the SEC is shelling out all of this money to go HDTV in the first place.

It isn’t because they have nothing else better to do with all of that money—think about it.

Look, I’m an ACC guy, but let’s be objective about some of these calls.

The Florida-MSU game — the replay guy had to determine if the ball came out before the player crossed the goal line from a camera trailing the play by 30 yards.  Nearly the same play cost my Tar Heels a game against Florida State last year.  When a play happens near the goal line, and the closest camera is behind the play by 30 yards, there’s not much chance a replay booth is going to find incontrovertible evidence.

The Cody Call — Yes, the official should have called excessive celebration, marched the ball back 15 yards, and made Alabama take a knee to end the game.  How this makes a list of "conspiracy" calls is beyond me.  Under no circumstances would it have been a re-kick.

The Alabama-LSU game — Again, the camera is across the field.  If you assume the divot was made while Patterson had possession — which is reasonable — then you can as a fan assume he had possession.  However, replay booths are not allowed to work that way.  They can’t use this replay to see where his hands were and that replay to see where his feet were.  No inferring or extrapolating allowed.  IF a camera had been pointing straight down the sideline, LSU probably gets the ball.  But from the angle they had, a HD-3D-Imax monitor doesn’t change that call.

Rather than blowing all that money on HD monitors and routing systems, how about installing some cameras pointing down the sidelines and goal lines?  Or better yet — both?  ESPN 2 is bringing all of 2 cameras with them.  Why aren’t some of these multi-million dollar stadium expansions taking that into account?