`The public demands certainties,” H.L. Mencken once wrote, “but there are no certainties.” Mencken’s words resonated last week as college football grappled with its latest hot-button issue: instant replay for officials’ calls. Mencken was no college football fan. He thought the game would be vastly more interesting if faculty played instead of students–a brilliant proposal, come to think of it–but he may have provided the best explanation why anyone would support such a foolish concept as instant replay.
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To my mind, instant replay is an effort to eliminate uncertainty. But uncertainty has always been part of college football’s maddening appeal, as has hilariously awful officiating.
It’s possible those who support instant replay genuinely believe in techno-cures. They obviously haven’t dealt with Ameritech recently.
There are plenty of reasons to oppose instant replay. It would cost money most college athletic departments don’t have. It would lengthen games that already last longer than Wagnerian operas. And it would add an impersonal stamp to a game that is, at its elemental level, charmingly human, which is to say flawed.
In a heated game against archrival Alabama years ago, Auburn scored a touchdown with 12 men on the field. The dozen Tigers were immortalized in a painting.
Considering the grimy history of Alabama and Auburn athletics, it seemed fitting that one of them beat the other by cheating on the field, as opposed to off it, which is usually the case.
The most recent furor erupted when the officials missed a couple of rather large fumble calls in Michigan’s 35-31 victory two weeks ago at Illinois. The Big Ten later apologized for the mistake, not that it did the Fighting Illini any good by then.
But there was an interesting sidelight to that controversy. That same afternoon, Big Ten officials blew a potentially more important call in Michigan State’s victory over Notre Dame in East Lansing. According to a conference source, the crew missed an illegal shift by the Fighting Irish offense on its last possession. Because Notre Dame eventually turned the ball over on downs, the gaffe didn’t matter. But what if the Irish had scored a touchdown on the play?
“That’s something that wouldn’t have shown up on replay,” the Big Ten source said. “But it would have been a much bigger error than a missed fumble call.” That raises an interesting question: Is replay really going to correct every error?
Let’s pretend it could. Is that a worthy goal? Refs blow it. So do coaches and players.
I should insert here that I’m partial to the zebras. My father was a longtime Little League umpire in the Southwest, and after he died they named our local ballfield in his honor.
A few years ago I had an opportunity to spend a game weekend with a Big Ten crew. On Friday night we sat in a coffee shop and swapped stories about great plays and games we’d seen over the years.
These were decent fellows, the kind you wouldn’t mind having a drink with. In my book, that set them apart from the microphone jockeys and typists who rail about the need for instant replay.
In college football, refs receive minimal compensation for their efforts. They subject themselves to unthinkable abuse, not to mention scrutiny, because they have a passion for the game. They’re not professionals, and it regularly shows in their performance.
The coaches, by contrast, draw huge salaries and spend all week preparing for Saturday afternoon. Despite this they still seem to commit some whopping blunders. The next time a team has a punt blocked, I’m going to demand to see a film of practice. Then I’ll break it down frame by frame to see just where the coach botched his special teams’ instruction.
That’s the gist of replay: Everything can be fixed if we just go to the tape. Most ideas hatched in the NFL are bad. Indoor football. Weeknight games. The Dallas Cowboys. But instant replay might be worst of all. It is the antithesis of spontaneity. It is inimical to whimsy. Beyond that, it wastes time.
Plenty of people seem to think replay is a winning idea. One colleague even proposed that instant replay be reserved for “big” games–those played on national television, say. “That way it doesn’t cost the people at Ball State anything,” he said.
The suggestion is so laughable that the NCAA is, of course, considering it. There’s a possibility that replay will be adopted for use in the four Bowl Championship Series games as early as 2001.
Many coaches have tried to put pressure on the NCAA by coming out in favor of replay. They’ll look you in the eye and say they just want to get the calls right, doggone it. The same coaches will tell you that football teaches lessons that go beyond the playing field.
Somehow these views don’t square. In life, as one former Bears coach used to put it, mistakes rarely wind up getting resolved so tidily.
I have an idea what Illinois players learned that night against Michigan. They learned how much it hurts to be wronged. They learned to get up and go on.
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They learned, most of all, that there are no certainties.
Pretty good lessons, I’d say. But let’s go to the tape to be sure.