Let’s say you’re a replay zealot, as I am.
What’s a replay zealot, first of all? Someone who believes in the more expansive use of replay to correct calls in all sports, someone who thinks that more applications of replay can only be a good thing for sports.
A replay zealot would look at the missed calls late in Monday night’s Final Four finale between Wisconsin and Duke and say this:
“Gosh, that missed travel and missed out-of-bounds call on Justise Winslow really hurt Wisconsin. Yet, because that sequence occurred outside the final two minutes of regulation and the scope of reviewable plays is so narrow in college basketball, no corrective mechanisms existed. This is why replay should be expanded relative to the amount of time on the clock and the number of plays that can be re-examined.”
That sounds good in theory — realize that I’m talking to myself here — but the idea of expanding replay in college basketball or any team sport quickly runs up against a very big problem: When replay is available, the officials or on-site monitor reviewers often:
A) fail to get the call (overturn) right;
B) take a lot of time to fail to get the call right.
We saw this on the out-of-bounds play involving Justise Winslow at the other end of the court, in which a loose ball appeared to graze Winslow’s fingers before going out of bounds. Fans at home received great work from the CBS production truck. The fingers appeared to bend backward, indicating light contact with the ball. The ball — traveling diagonally at one point — appeared to move in a more downward direction with less speed, indicating that its trajectory had been altered… naturally, by Winslow’s touch.
Fans could see this at home.
The officials?
Refs to CBS after that non-reversal: "They just couldn't see anything." What a quote for the ages.
— Tim May (@TIM_MAYsports) April 7, 2015
This was the equivalent of many embarrassing moments for football replay-booth reviewers, chiefly the 2014 Ohio State-Penn State game in which a clear incompletion was somehow ruled an interception on the field and more improbably upheld in the booth.
More replay? If football’s booth reviewers and basketball’s on-court officials can’t get it right with the consistency players expect, there is no good reason to expand replay — as a replay zealot, I must acknowledge this.
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Let’s take a detour from the larger issue at hand and address Wisconsin’s frustrations, which clearly boiled over in postgame reactions and remarks Monday night.
The Badgers, especially coach Bo Ryan, will be seen by their detractors as ungracious. (Fair point? Perhaps in microcosm, but adjusted for the nature of the situation and the magnitude of the occasion, one should cut the Badgers some slack in this case.)
On the margins of this discussion, it is true that Wisconsin players do seem to react more dramatically to foul calls than a lot of other players in college basketball… especially in proportion to the number of fouls called against them during a typical game. The extent to which Wisconsin bothers other Big Ten basketball fan bases is rooted in this basic component of the team’s overall comportment and decorum during games.
However… one can make narrowly (psychologically) accurate claims about Wisconsin’s relationship to officiating and still point out that:
A) the Badgers endured some very difficult moments in the Final Four — Saturday and Monday — courtesy of the officials;
B) the roughest moments occurred at the hands of replay reviews that provided erroneous judgments.
We wrote about this on Saturday after the Badgers’ win over Kentucky. The difficult thing for the Badgers to accept about Saturday’s officiating against Kentucky (even though they were given a makeup call-flavored basket they didn’t deserve later in regulation) is that the officials had a chance to correct a mistake by reviewing Trey Lyles’ blow to the face of Josh Gasser. When a flagrant 1 was not ruled, after extended evaluation at the scorer’s table, what should Wisconsin or any team in a similar situation think about the mindset of officials?
Live-ball calls will be missed, but obvious replay errors? That’s when faith in the officials and the larger system of replay is eroded to a highly alarming degree.
When another replay call was missed against Duke, Wisconsin had to think it was Saturday night all over again. A team with a bigger brand name got the benefit of a call that should have gone the other way.
It’s hard to view Wisconsin’s reaction to Monday night and say, “Now THERE’S a team which took defeat graciously. SMU, after that questionable (but correct) goaltending call against UCLA, took that loss honorably, and with a lot more patience than many other teams would have. Wisconsin? PFFT!”
Narrowly, that criticism of Wisconsin would not be inaccurate.
However, this goes back to the point about cutting the Badgers some slack here: The reality of seeing replay calls go against them in consecutive Final Four games creates a unique and unanticipated emotional dynamic in which one can — and should — allow Wisconsin’s emotions to spill out without judging the Badgers harshly.
You’d probably be mad, too — that’s the upshot of it, even though Duke clearly earned this victory with its defense and superior backcourt play in the closing minutes.
This leads us back to our original discussion for a closing remark and a basic solution.
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If replay zealots such as myself are forced to acknowledge that replay fails to correct a lot of obvious mistakes — often enough to be noticed, and especially in the biggest games of the season — I can’t just bang the table and say, “MORE REPLAY AVAILABILITY!”
There has to be an adjustment to the replay system in general. In college football, I’ve already written about this.
It’s time for the same thing in college basketball: centralized command-center-based replay, as the NBA has adopted for this season.
This view does not come from an outsider, I hasten to tell you.
I officiated high school basketball for a handful of years and know what it’s like to stand in a gymnasium with a charged-up partisan crowd getting on your back, and coaches breathing fire after a questionable call. Not every official has the same mindset, but every official shares the quality of being human, which means being vulnerable to emotions and the heat of the moment.
On the topic of replay review, then, officials — I know this because I used to be one — are often emotionally invested in the calls they make. Note the specific language: Officials are invested in the calls they make, NOT necessarily in making the right call.
There is a certain emotional attachment to the initial call, meaning that officials will often stick with that call if there’s even the slightest shred of doubt, rather than say, “Well, I probably was wrong, and that’s good enough for me to overturn it, even though I’m not 100-percent certain.”
Why do we need command center replay in college basketball, then? The answer — having been set up in everything you’ve read above — is simple, perhaps deceptively so:
When you put a replay decision in the hands of someone who’s not on the court, and who possesses both geographical and emotional distance from a call, there is no worry about having to uphold the original call for the sake of protecting the official’s ego — an ego I not only carried onto the court, but HAD to carry onto the court.
You are taught in officiating school to sell your call, even if it’s wrong, to own your call and make sure your body language and comportment convey belief in your call… to your officiating partners, but also to the players and coaches. You might think that’s wrong, but it’s actually sound advice. An official needs to be confident on the court; otherwise, everyone around him or her will quickly lose trust. Strictly on a psychological level, officials have to sell their calls, right or wrong. This works at the high school level (especially for junior varsity games, which don’t feed into state playoff tournaments and therefore lack the high-stakes component of varsity games).
At the college level? It ironically becomes a problem, especially when replay is involved. In a high-school gymnasium, you’re not affecting a billion-dollar industry with saturation media coverage. In the Final Four, it’s different. Officials should be entrusted with trying their best to get calls right in real time.
Replay reviews, on the other hand, should be entrusted to specialists in command centers, because those specialists don’t have to worry about selling a call, right or wrong — they just have to worry about getting the call right.
Command-center-based replay: more and more sports are doing it. College sports are behind the curve, but basketball — like football — needs to be willing to take the plunge… and sooner rather than later.
Wisconsin and all other Division I teams deserve as much.
