Instant doesn't mean hasty
Let me put my two cents in on this instant replay controversy from the Oklahoma-Oregon game. From what I could see from the ABC TV cameras, awarding the onside kick to Oregon was a big failure of the instant replay system.
Oklahoma president David Boren wrote to the Pac-10 and stated that the game should be eliminated from the record books. That’s a bunch of hogwash. He should go back to handling the academic affairs of his fine university and leave any action or reaction to the athletic director he hired.
There have been mistakes in officiating since the beginning of sport. Even though we now have replay, there will continue to be human errors. We can't go changing the outcome of games just because we the fans – along with help of what sometimes seems like 2,700 TV cameras – have a better view of a call than officials on the field or in the replay booth.
Yes, Oklahoma almost surely would have won the game if it had been awarded possession on that kick. But every coach in America knows the Sooners didn't have to give up that final touchdown pass, nor did they have to fail to adequately protect the kicker on their own final field-goal attempt that could have won the game.
All that said, my biggest disappointment was in the way in which replay was administered.
Apparently replay official Gordon Riese never even saw the ABC clip that we all saw. My understanding is that he saw a replay which appeared to show the ball hitting the helmet of an Oklahoma player at the same time as the initial contact, which would make the ball live. Because the game already had gone long and he felt he was under pressure to make a quick decision, he believed there was not enough evidence to overrule the call on the field.
If getting the game over more quickly is more important than getting the correct answer on instant replay, we have a real problem.
If the replay official had understood – as he should have – how important this call was to the outcome of the game, he would have waited for every available replay before rendering a final decision. He would have seen the angle all of us did and realized it should have been Oklahoma's ball.
About 99 percent of the time instant replay has been a positive development for college football. But officials need to make sure they take a look at every possible angle and not let a situation quite like this happen again.
