Instant Replay Needs Out

Jay Cutler rolls left. He turns to throw up field and loses the handle on the ball. it’s a fumble! Chargers recover, they can kneel down and win the game! Right?
OK the coach threw the red flag, but it was a fumble, it was obvious, right? Wrong.
Referee Ed Hochuli trots out and announces that its an incomplete pass. 10 million people went, WHAT!!?? Broncos then throw a touchdown, go for two and win the game.
Each and every week of NFL football, I become more and more baffled at why there is still instant replay challenges.
After some shady refereeing in the late 90s, the NFL finally decided to put in instant replay in 1999. At the time, I agreed with the move. But after seeing it put into practice, well, the grass wasn’t greener on the other side.
What I didn’t anticipate was that the game would come to a ten minute complete stop after a red flag was tossed.
The ref has to walk over to the coach, have an intimate conversation about the play, their kids school play and maybe even how to fix that leaky kitchen sink. 3 minutes elapse.
Then, the ref walks slowly over to a video booth, stands for 3 more minutes watching all 263 camera angles, talks to the people, “Upstairs,” and finally comes to a decision.
All the while, we the viewer are watching commercials. You know what makes me enjoy a football game? Commercials.
We already get commercials after an extra point, then again after the kickoff, then again half way through the drive for a, “TV timeout.”
But seeing the same boring Family Guy punch line 43 times isn’t the only problem.
There are hardly ever any challenges that get overturned. Hall of Fame Coach Joe Gibbs had only 7% of his challenges overturned. The league on average only gets 2 out of every 10 overturned.
So eight of out ten times, we’re wasting our time.
If it wasn’t already confusing enough, there are plays that are, “Not reviewable.”
You can review if a receivers foot was in bounds, but you can’t review if he was forced out. Sometimes you can review if a player was down by contact, sometimes you can’t. And the one I never understood, you can’t review if a field goal was good or not. WHY?
Coaches have also gotten rather clever when it comes to replay. They know that if they take a timeout to stop a teams momentum, it will be 30 seconds and back to it. If they challenge a play, it will be the aforementioned 10 minute delay.
Its kind of like the way college basketball coaches use timeouts, only ten times the length and there is a possibility of getting a flunky referee to overturn the play.
Major League Baseball has just started introducing instant replay, only on home runs so far, but who knows where that will lead. For baseball fans, this should be a (excuse the pun) a red flag.