replay Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
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 ...
NBA Set To Add Coach's Challenges To Review System Next Season
According to a memo reportedly sent Friday morning, the NBA will be experimenting with adding a coach’s challenge to its current replay review system. The trial will begin with summer league basketball next month, but the league “anticipates using the rule during the 2019-20 regular season as part o...
Almost Every Penalty Kick Save Ever Is Illegal Now And It's A Mess
The idea, which is not an unreasonable one on its face, is to “get it right.” The less inspiring extension of that is “to avoid something horribly embarrassing.” There are examples that spring to mind when it comes to justifying VAR’s existence—the people in charge are probably thinking of moments ...
VAR Has One Job, And It's Failing Miserably At It
The most common complaint against VAR—or any form of video review in sports—in one of aesthetics. If referees insist on stopping the game for several minutes to double check every key play, the thinking goes, all the drama and intensity and emotion of the biggest moments will be lost, and the celebr...
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 Avalanche Were Sunk By A Bad Rule, Badly Applied
Pretend you don’t know anything about hockey. Take a look at this frozen moment of action. Where is the puck? Where is the play happening, and where is it not? Who is involved in the action, and who still has the potential to affect it? Who is violating the rules? More importantly, who is violating ...
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...
The Kentucky Derby Was Decided By Some Video Replay Bullshit
For a brief moment on Saturday, Luis Saez felt an immense happiness that can only overcome someone that has achieved one of the greatest accomplishments of their life. He had won the Kentucky Derby with his horse, Maximum Security, by one-and-a-half lengths and spoke about how the victory was a drea...
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 Owners Vote To Make Pass Interference Calls And Non-Calls Reviewable
That replay review would be expanded to include pass interference ahead of the 2019-2020 NFL season seemed inevitable. The question, then, was whether it would be expanded in such a way that it could hope to address the kind of situation that befouled the NFC Championship game in January, when the S...
The NFL Isn't Quite Sure How To Fix Pass Interference
The NFL acknowledges that pass interference is kind of a mess. Not only is it perhaps the most subjective of judgment calls officials are asked to make, but the very nature of it—often with more than five or 10 or even 15 yards in the balance—means it has the potential to swing games more than any o...
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...
VAR Shat All Over Yesterday's Tottenham-Chelsea League Cup Match
Tottenham beat Chelsea in the first leg of their League Cup semifinal tie yesterday by a score of 1-0 thanks to a video replay-awarded penalty decision that was so comprehensively terrible that it had both managers trashing VAR after the match....
Bears Complete 30-Yard Pass For No Gain As Officials Recover Fumble
The Eagles-Bears game got weird right before halftime when Eagles cornerback Cre’Von Leblanc wrested the ball from Bears receiver Anthony Miller in an impressive display of strength. The play was initially ruled an incompletion, but the inhuman standard of slow motion showed that Miller caught the b...
Refs Cost Chargers And Ravens Touchdowns On Consecutive Plays
A bizarre sequence came to the cosmically correct ending in the Chargers-Ravens game. Refs and replay officials arguably blew at least four separate calls at the 1-yard-line before the Chargers finally punched it in for a 20-3 lead....