Instant Replay is Destroying America

Or modern sports are a reflection of a sick society - you decide.

Instant replay is a symbol of nearly everything that is wrong in modern America.  If you don’t agree with me after reading this, I’d love to hear why.

If you are even a casual fan of sports in modern America, sometime in the last decade you have found yourself glued to a screen trying to determine the position of an athlete’s toe, or a ball’s relation to a real or imagined line on the ground or one that theoretically extends to infinity in the air or some other relationship between people and objects on some field of sport.  It has felt incredibly important to you, and has caused anxiety, argument with and possibly cursing of those around you.

I’m with you almost all the way.  Every time this happens, my anxiety level rises as well.  However, as my friends and family can attest – I’m upset every time this happens because instant replay is ruining sports, and possibly all of western civilization (OK – a stretch there, but definitely sports). 

Why should we care?  Sports are obviously a great tool for the development of physical fitness, but they are also a great tool for learning about life.  There will always be someone faster, taller, stronger than you.  Find your comparative advantage and use that to its fullest.  Be a good teammate so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  Be a good opponent so others will play against you again in the future.  Work hard to develop your skills and you will improve.  You will not go undefeated in life.  Learn to lose honorably.  And finally, life is not “fair”.  There will be bad bounces that are out of your control.  Many times, there are no do-overs.  If you get a bad break, you get up, dust yourself off and move forward.  In short, life is not perfect…

There are five dimensions we’ll use to evaluate the proposition that instant replay is undermining all of this – False Perfectibility, Legalization, Centralized Control, the Surveillance State, and the Financialization of Everything.  There are surely other dimensions here as you think critically on this topic, but we’ll stick to these five to keep the length of this piece manageable.

False Perfectibility

The central conceit of instant replay is that the outcome of sporting contests, (which are by their very definition highly variable), can be perfected.  As already mentioned, life is not perfectible.  Jean Jacque Rousseau’s philosophical assertions that humans and thus life are perfectible led to more human misery than any other idea in the history of mankind. 

Each organized sport of any size has a set of rules that ideally will be applied equally with a goal of producing “fair play”.  During play, these rules are passively adjudicated by the participants themselves who by and large attempt to stay within the rules while also striving for victory.  Active adjudication began in 1881 and has been done by neutral referees who are physically on or near the field of play¹.

Instant replay evolved into a tool of officiating due to the increased frequency and quality of broadcasting sporting events on television.  Starting in the early 1960’s it became possible for television audiences to see “instant” replays of action during a live sporting event.  What audiences could now see in near-real-time was that referees were human, and they made mistakes.  Sometimes these mistakes happened on critical plays that could influence the outcome of a game.  As technology evolved, passionate sports fans loudly clamored for using this tool to “fix” mistakes of referees during games.  Like in so many other spheres, the trade-offs of “progress” were not fully appreciated.  Instant replay now stops games in their tracks for reviews that take an excruciating amount of time to watch the same play over and over and over again.  The review of a single play takes a large multiple of the amount of time that the play itself took.  Play stops.  Perfection is pursued, do-overs are granted or not, and the idea that life can be paused while we sort out an unachievable ideal of “fairness” is ingrained in our culture.  This leads to the next harbinger of doom…

Legalization

What is happening on television broadcasts during the official replay while referees are attempting to perfect their craft?  There is a deep consultation between the game’s commentators and the newest fixture on most broadcast teams: the “Rules Analyst”.  In every other aspect of life, we have another word for “rules analysts” – we call them “lawyers”.  Listening to this banter is basically like watching Court TV.  The rule(s) in question are dissected in excruciating detail to the point where you yourself begin to question if you could identify the act of catching a ball when your son does it in the front yard.  If we just correctly started calling these folks “lawyers”, the underlying structure of what is really happening here would be hard for people to miss.  “Hey y’all, we’ve stopped this broadcast of team X against team Y to ask some lawyers what should happen next.”  Lawyers are necessary in some aspects of life, but let’s go light on them in arenas that should be giving us examples for how to live our daily lives.  (The game already has judges in the form or referees and the head coaches are the advocates/lawyers for their teams.  This is enough.)  More lawyers actively involved in live sporting contests is a bug, not a feature with regards to where we are as a society.

Even with the introduction of game-by-game instant replay review by referees on the field or in a booth watching the game, we have not yet arrived at a “fair enough” system for those striving to perfect every one of life’s daily interactions.  How can we be sure that these various officials are all interpreting these rules consistently?  There should be a higher authority that ensures consistency!  This leads to….

Centralized Control

In some sports², they’ve decided that technology to show instant replays from multiple angles to the referees on the scene locally just leaves too much room for imperfection.  If you pay attention during broadcasts now, you’ll often hear something along the lines of “they are reviewing this back in New York”.  Just another great example for how to live and interact in our daily lives.  Local authorities cannot be trusted to make “important decisions”, like whether an athlete stepped out of bounds on 2^nd and 4.

The Surveillance State

The enabling technology for modern instant replay is a microcosm of the surveillance state.  Each professional sporting event has turned into a panopticon where every angle of every interaction is recorded. Pay attention to all the different cameras now on the field.  There’s a pylon cam in football.  Why?  So microscopic reviews can be done of the relation between a ball, a line, a knee, and the ground.  The referees often wear body-cams.  Cameras are pointed everywhere and we just get comfortable with something that should naturally feel creepy.  There is nowhere you can go in the stadium to escape the eye in the sky.

It's entertainment!  These angles make the broadcast more complete and exciting!  Also, this technology enables the retroactive ability of the governing body to search for and punish heretofore unnoticed infractions.  Elite level athletes are flying around the field at unimaginable speeds making split-second decisions during these contests.  Then several days later, they get an email from the league office notifying them that they have been fined for something discovered on film or disqualified from the next game. How are we all OK with this?  More importantly, why is this happening….

Financialization of Everything

“Because it’s so important to get critical calls correctly.”  Um, why?  “Because the stakes are so high.”  Um, what stakes?  “Tens of millions of dollars are riding on this game.”  Oh, now I see.  I don’t know if the deep financialization of sports is the most un-American thing or the most American thing I can imagine.  It seems inevitable that these sporting franchises which are owned by successful businesspeople turned into cold-blooded businesses.  When you step back and look at the variety of ways sports have been strip-mined for monetization, it is both impressive and depressing.  Ticket sales used to be the thing.  Broadcast rights were added to it.  Merchandising for sure.  But now sports gambling is becoming a massive, direct partner to professional sports. 

ESPN spends billions on the rights to broadcast live sporting events.  These are now so valuable because it is the last bit of television that can guarantee live audiences who will sit still for commercials.  (The next game you see an instant replay, notice that these are often accompanied by a commercial break while they sort it out.  They are actually making money off instant replay.)  This isn’t enough for ESPN, (owned by family-friendly Disney).  They have now launched ESPN Bets so they can make money off the least respectable aspect of sports.  Betting lines, prop bets, spreads, over/unders, etc.… are all now littered throughout most broadcasts on this family network.  PLEASE GAMBLE ON SPORTS is the none-too-subtle message.  Instead of just wasting your entire day Saturday and Sunday watching 48 straight hours of games, you can now easily lose all the money you made the other 5 days of the week!  We’re picking on ESPN as an example here, but they didn’t lead the way – they just acquiesced to what must have seemed inevitable.

People love to make fun of Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, due to the futility of that franchise on the field over the last several decades.  I would love to be teased for turning a $140 million investment into a $9 billion asset.  The ‘problem’ with this kind of success is that now professional sports teams are so expensive that billionaires can’t afford to buy them!  This sounds like a problem for capital markets.  This year the NFL changed their ownership rules to allow private equity firms to purchase small portions of teams.  Expect very shortly for “small portions of” to disappear from that sentence.  It should not be surprising if most teams are owned by private equity firms or large corporations in the near future.  If you are wondering why all of a sudden, the WNBA is getting crammed down your throat every time you turn around, it’s 1% woke and 99% a business opportunity. They can’t wait to sell you ads, tickets, t-shirts and parlays on all the action, and the opportunity to draw in the half of our population (women) not already captured by this machine is way too juicy to pass up.

“Capitalism is great” and “not everything should be financialized” are two thoughts you should be able to hold in your head at the same time.  Sports as a microcosm for life’s lessons are now teaching us a very different lesson about life.  Do they reflect life around them or drive changes in the culture?  Probably a little bit of both.  Unfortunately, that reflection now shows the following:

1.        Life is perfectible, and that is our mission,

2.        Lawyers should be involved in almost every minor decision,

3.        Centralized authority is the only way to ensure true fairness,

4.        We need a surveillance state to give central authorities enough information to control our daily lives, and

5.        Everything should be financialized with every important property owned by a few mega-corporations.

This is uncomfortably aligned with how many aspects of daily life can now feel.  “Hey – here’s a ticket in the mail because a camera caught you slow rolling a right turn on a red light at an empty intersection.  If you don’t pay, we’ll send you to jail, run by Jail Corp.”  Is there some hyperbole in this piece?  Of course.  But on the spectrum of “everything is fine” to “this is worrisome”– this has moved and is moving towards worrisome.  Prepare yourself for games that are interrupted because lawyers for the Goldman Sachs Giants and the Andreesen Horowitz 49ers have filed dueling legal motions 3,000 miles away from the game.  You will be told that the final score of this pre-season game is New York 21, San Francisco 20… pending appeal.  

Now I need to check in on my three fantasy football teams.

Pictured above - Saul Goodman head litigator for the Pfizer Cleveland Browns reflecting on a successful challenge.

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Footnotes

(Kind of don’t care how precise these are. The general point is I didn’t totally make this all up.)

¹ – ChatGPT:

The first recorded use of a referee in sports dates back to the late 19th century in association football (soccer). The use of referees became common in the 1870s, but the official introduction of referees to mediate disputes happened in 1881 in an English Football Association match.

Before the referee's role was formalized, disputes were typically settled by team captains or umpires (who represented each team). However, as the sport evolved and matches became more competitive, the need for a neutral party arose, leading to the introduction of a central referee.

Key Details:

• Sport: Association Football (Soccer)

• First use of referee: 1881, in an English FA match

This was the first time a neutral referee was given the power to enforce rules and make decisions on the field during play.

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² – ChatGPT:

1. NHL (National Hockey League):

• The NHL was one of the first leagues to implement remote replay reviews. Since 1991, the NHL has had a "Situation Room" located in Toronto, where officials review disputed goals and other crucial plays during games.

• All video reviews for potentially game-changing plays, such as whether a puck crossed the goal line or was affected by a high stick, are handled by the Situation Room in real time, in coordination with the on-ice officials.

2. MLB (Major League Baseball):

• In 2014, MLB introduced an expanded instant replay system, and reviews are handled at the MLB Replay Operations Center in New York City.

• All replay reviews, initiated either by team challenges or by umpires, are sent to this centralized location where trained officials analyze the plays from multiple camera angles and make a final ruling.

3. NBA (National Basketball Association):

• The NBA has a Replay Center located in Secaucus, New Jersey, which opened in 2014. This center assists in reviewing crucial moments during games, such as determining the correct time left on the clock, whether a shot was released before the buzzer, or if a foul was flagrant.

• On-court referees can communicate with officials at the Replay Center during reviews, and final decisions are often made through collaboration between the Replay Center and on-site officials.

4. MLS (Major League Soccer) and VAR (Video Assistant Referee) in Soccer:

• In Major League Soccer, the Video Review (VAR) system often involves centralized review by officials located at league headquarters or a designated location.

• In some international leagues and tournaments, VAR decisions may be reviewed remotely by officials not present in the stadium, although the final on-field decision still rests with the head referee. The VAR officials communicate with the head referee after reviewing footage.

5. NFL (National Football League):

• While NFL reviews happen with the on-field referee consulting a video monitor, starting in 2014, the NFL has also incorporated real-time communication with a centralized NFL Replay Center in New York.

• The centralized officiating team assists the referees in reviewing calls, but the on-field referee still makes the final decision after consultation.

These centralized review systems help ensure consistency and accuracy in decision-making, particularly for complex or game-altering plays, while removing some of the pressure from on-field officials.