instant-replay Page 1 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Deadspin’s deep dive into umpire stats: accuracy and consistency are key
Umpires are supposed to get every call right to the point where they have virtually no impact on the outcome of the game. Therefore, whenever an umpire does affect the outcome of a game, people start to take notice. ...
Quit crying about official reviews — they gotta get the call right
Always get the call right....
Behold, a fun few moments of instant replay in baseball
Sometimes, instant replay is a real drag. It takes forever to review some minor call that doesn’t make that much of a difference anyway, the flow of the game is broken, and you wonder if we’d be better off without it, even if sometimes bad calls do get corrected, because even though they do, a lot o...
The problem with replay is it’s still run by people
I am not advocating sports being run by robots or AI. At least not intentionally. The expansion of video review in various sports hasn’t been the salve for controversial calls that we have all hoped. But it’s run by people, which means their faults are still in play. The issue is that whatever sport...
Oklahoma's Playoff Chances Might Have Just Died Because Of A Couple Frames Of Video
Let’s get the obvious out of the way now: Kansas State’s performance on Saturday against No. 5 Oklahoma was, for all intents and purposes, deserving of a victory. But that’s what makes exactly how the 48-41 win was sealed all the more frustrating....
Why NFL Officiating Is Such A Shitshow Right Now
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the NFL is having officiating problems. This year’s crop of rules controversies has a little bit of everything, from inscrutable procedures and points of emphasis that seem to change on a whim to inexperience within the ranks to the role of technology and the...
As Expected, The NFL's Pass Interference Replay Rule Has Been A Huge Mess
What you see above looks like a textbook pass interference penalty. Patriots cornerback Jonathan Jones pretty clearly hooked the arm of Giants wideout Golden Tate before the ball arrived. No flag was thrown. Yet even after Giants head coach Pat Shurmur challenged the non-call—as the rules permit coa...
Interminable Mike Pereira Rules Monologue Interrupted Several Times By Ghastly Football
The NFL’s got to clean this crap up. The Thursday night game between the Panthers and Buccaneers was already a hellish, dismal slog, featuring punchless, amateurish offense run by a pair of deeply disinterested quarterbacks. Then the fourth quarter rolled around, and what might’ve otherwise been at ...
The New Handball Rule Is The Cold, VAR Is Cancer
For the second time in as many weeks of the new Premier League season, the biggest story from the weekend was another ruinously stupid imposition of VAR. The only thing more tiring than having to write the umpteenth anti-VAR post is having to witness video replay poison this wonderful sport from wee...
Making Pass Interference Reviewable Isn't Going To Make It Any Clearer
The play above was flagged. If you didn’t watch—and, dear reader, I sincerely hope you had something better to do last night than watch a Bengals-Skins preseason game into the fourth quarter—can you guess what the call was? Can you guess which player was flagged? More to the point, can you guess wha...
VAR Is Turning Everyone Into Cops
The opening weekend of the Premier League season was in some ways bittersweet—the sweetness provided by the return of the best league in the world, the bitterness from the sad end of England’s noble resistance to the scourge of VAR. To anyone expecting to witness the inherently corrosive effects of ...
The NFL's New Pass Interference Replay Rule Is Going To Be Pretty Chaotic
The NFL’s competition committee issued its recommendations for how instant replay for pass interference will work, based on the rule that had been approved in March. On one hand, some relatively prudent judgement has been ironed into the standards the league will use to review and overturn pass inte...
The Women's World Cup Has Already Been Marred By Some Corny VAR Bullshit
There is no shortage of arguments to be made against the proliferation of replay review in soccer, and I won’t bog down this blog post with points we’ve already made on the site many times over. Besides, the argument against the VAR decision from today’s Women’s World Cup opening match between Franc...
The Big Wet President Blames Kentucky Derby Result On PC Police
Given the fact that Donald Trump could probably name every host of Fox & Friends in chronological order before he could name one Supreme Court justice he didn’t nominate, it should come as no surprise that our doughboy president chose to weigh in on the video replay controversy at the Kentucky Derby...
VAR Will Ruin Everything
Yesterday, millions around the world watched Raheem Sterling cap one of the wildest matches they will ever see with a stunning last-gasp winning goal, only to be told a minute or so later that it never happened....
Fuck This Instant Replay Bullshit
With 68 seconds left in overtime of the NCAA Tournament’s championship game, Virginia’s De’Andre Hunter poked the ball out from the hands of Texas Tech guard Davide Moretti, sending the ball out of bounds. To everyone watching, from the fans in attendance to those at home and especially to the CBS a...
NFL Competition Committee Recommends Subjecting Another Several Parts Of The Game To Replay Review
The NFL Competition Committee, headed by Atlanta Falcons president Rich McKay and totally coincidentally including New Orleans head coach Sean Payton, recommended an expansion of replay review today, addressing among other things exactly the circumstance that recently screwed the Saints and sent the...
VAR Is Making A Mess Of The Champions League
However we got here, we’re certainly here now. When the Champions League announced that it would introduce VAR—Video Assistant Referee, essentially soccer’s answer to the instant replay challenge—midway through this current campaign, the system brought years of baggage with it. Its deployment at las...
Football Needs Blown Calls
To head off the inevitable whataboutism: Yes, the Rams got hosed too, by multiple missed penalties. But none of those were as blatant, as obvious in realtime, or as directly would have changed the outcome of the game, as the missed pass interference by Rams cornerback Nickell Robey-Coleman on Saints...
There's Only One Way This Could Get Worse
It is absolutely rotten that the Saints’ season was ended at least in part by two blown pass interference calls, including an inexplicable one in the last two minutes. Rams corner Nickell Robey-Coleman, who smashed Saints receiver Tommylee Lewis in the head while the ball was in the air, said of the...