Reviewing Replay

If you’ve watched the NFL at any point during this season, you’d know that the league has had its fair share on issues. From injuries, to anthem protests, baffling suspensions (and suspension corrections), commercial breaks, the level of play on the field and of course, replay reviews, it has just be a seemingly never ending horrible movie.

Injuries are a part of the game and there really isn’t much the teams can do to help out this issue with the current CBA. Roger Goodell has too much authority over the league and changed the league practice schedule to the point where the players have a minimal amount of practice time in pads in tandem with short weeks for Thursday games you have injuries to high level players like Odell Beckham Jr. and Aaron Rodgers. Practice schedules and player safety will be at the top of the long list of requests the players and the players union has for the next CBA, but teams have to make do with what they have and just hope that the injury bug doesn’t hit them too hard.

The Thursday game issue is something that will take more than a collective bargaining agreement to settle. The reason being is because of the amount of money that is coming in from the streaming services for the Thursday games. There is now denying that the players just don’t have enough time to recover from the previous Sunday to perform at the level that is expected when they step on the field for the Thursday matchup. Playing in a NFL is described as “getting hit by a tracker trailer over and over again for 60 minutes” by players, and yet we expect these players to have some robotic function that can miraculously make them recover faster than us normal humans because “they are used to the hits.” That reasoning should be thrown out the window. Thursday football should be designated for the Opening Game of the season between the Super Bowl Champion and their Conference Champion counterpart from the year before and Thanksgiving—that’s it. For the NFL to make up for the money lost with the lack of Thursday games you can add two more regular season games so every team can have two bye weeks (this concept has been floating around for years I am by no means the doctrine of this theory). However, it does make a lot of sense because it’ll allow for the players to have an extra week, and it’ll make up the money if you cut all but four Thursday games. Is the NFL forgetting that the reason Thursday Night Football was such a hot ticket was because it happened in moderation and it was divisional games at the start of playoff race. The league has completely gotten away from what made Thursday Night Football great and it cannot be hidden with some neon jerseys.

Suspensions on the other hand I think I may be the only person the island. I’ve been vocal about this issue on my podcast for some time and my position on it hasn’t changed. The NFL has been handing out ludicrous suspensions over the past few weeks (in particular) for plays that would have regular citizens put in jail for the actions these players are committing on the field. The suspensions I’m thinking of happened as a response to the fight between Michael Crabtree and Aqib Talib and the Rob Gronkowski incident three weeks ago in Buffalo. Both incidents should have landed both Talib, Crabtree, and Gronk on the bench for five games with any chance for reduction and a fine of $250,000. If that seems steep, well it is for a reason. These players don’t get guarteed money so cutting about a third of their games and a decently large fine will send a message. Major League Baseball had a similar problem with steroids a couple years back and they severally cracked down on the steroid users with serve punishments. There haven’t been many players connected to steroids since the suspensions have been laid out. There is no reduction on the suspensions for the players connected to steroids and there shouldn’t be any reductions for players that commit the types of malicious acts Talib, Crabtree, and Gronkowski did. The suspension reduction process is made for players who were giving a harsher punishment then they deserved. For players who deliberately take the game into their own hands need to be held accountable.     

Protests come with the tide of the social tides that come and go with the times. These anthem protests will completely go away next year when the new NFL rule that will play the National Anthem before the players come out onto the field. With that, these protests will turn the camera around and show the fans that will kneel or sit with the players who have protested in the past. So, all the people that cannot watch football because the players are kneeling can tune back into football and watch their favorite team play.

The issue of play on the field became a mainstream issue at about the midway point of the season last year and arguably has been the main headline ever since. The NFL has a competition problem and they need to find a way to make the product on the field worth the price of tickets and worth switching over too on television. And so far, if you have a subscription to the red zone channel or Sunday Ticket. If you just have a regular cable subscription, in the case of the NFL, it’s like playing Russian Rolette with nuclear missiles (sorry if that hits too close to home). You either get a game of the year candidate or you need to be strapped down to a medical table and force yourself to get through the game. The play on the field has something to do with the replay system. And, after sitting through the millionth five-minute wait on a replay decision, there is a united front to try and fix the replay system. This conversation has been going on in all sports and with the NFL it hasn’t that big of a conversation because they seemed like the only league that sorta did it right. That all changed with a Austin Seferian-Jenkins reversal a couple of weeks back and has now manifested into a giant mess with everyone in sports shouting their take at the top of their lungs.

The solution seems to be lying in front of us like an imaginary friend and the majority doesn’t believe in it yet. What that solution is has been screamed in my house for some time every time a replay takes longer than it should. “Every replay should last 30 seconds, after that if you can’t find anything to change the call, the play stands and we play on.” Thanks dad, it makes a lot of sense and would make watching football enjoyable again.

Everything would be fixed in theory until we fix the catch rule. I know that the “what is a catch” conversation is as old as time but just like the replay rule that my dad solved seven years ago, there is a quick fix for the catch rule. As the rule stands now; “a player must maintain possession throughout contact and the ground.” If the ball moves by the width of a finger nail the play gets reversed. And, the rule fix that would change the ruling on Dez Bryant play, the two Austin Seferian-Jenkins play, and the Jesse James play is changing the receiver into a “runner” as soon as he has the ball in his hands and he has established possession. Once the receiver has two feet, one knee, an elbow, or his rear end in bounds with the ball in his hands he now becomes a runner and everything the player does after that should be treated as if a running back had the ball in his hands. So, when Seferian-Jenkins and Jesse James reached the ball over the goal line and “lost possession of the ball because of the ground” it wouldn’t matter because if Le’Von Bell or Kamara reached the ball and a random safety knocked the ball out of their hands the play would stand for some undenounced to everyone around football. How the NFL hasn’t thought of this is utterly inexcusable because of how the NFL has handled everything surrounding the game off the field.

If the NFL wants to start to fix itself it’ll have to start with the field and the product on it. Concussions will happen just because of the nature of the sport and injuries happen, but the set of rules that dictate whether team wins or loses has become a mockery in the league. And, for the league that revolutionized the replay system has not innovated the system in a decade. The National Football League is at a cross roads and all of this is something that Roger Goodell cannot continue to look away from, he’s already done this with the concussions, and if he is choosing to be blind to all of this just to make a quick buck—he will see his wondrous league start to break down and become the carbon copy of the XFL. Don’t overreact to that statement it won’t happen for at least another decade because it will take about that long for the numbers to drop and kids start playing other sports.

I’ve had a conflicting feeling throughout the year when I watch football on Sunday and when I look at the game of football on every other day of the week. On Sunday, I find myself saying that I love the game due to the beauty of the game when it is played well and everything that comes with a well-played football game. By Wednesday I’m annoyed or angered with some topic that has come out about the league. I just want to watch football and have regular sports conversations throughout the week and not be overwhelmed with mishandled suspensions, season ending injuries, or refs that are starting to look worse than those terrible replacement refs that we saw in Seattle back in 2012. The year that will determine the direction of the NFL is 2021 and all the league has to do is be able to crawl into those negotiations and hopefully some of this will get fixed the way it needs to. Football is the number one sport in the country but if its run the way it has been over the past couple of years, that title may be in trouble.