Mar 11, 2011 7:00 AM

March 11, 1986: NFL Adopts Instant Replay

1986: The National Football League adopts an instant-replay system for reviewing disputed calls. Prior to the 1986 regular season, NFL coaches had no way of challenging an official’s on-field call (other than throwing a colorful sideline tirade likely to end up in a penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct, while achieving nothing). The best a coach could […]

1986: The National Football League adopts an instant-replay system for reviewing disputed calls.

Prior to the 1986 regular season, NFL coaches had no way of challenging an official's on-field call (other than throwing a colorful sideline tirade likely to end up in a penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct, while achieving nothing). The best a coach could hope for was that a seriously blown call might be spotted and overturned by the officials themselves.

Officials get the calls right most of the time, even the close ones. But they do miss, sometimes at critical moments of the game. So as video technology advanced to the point where plays could be quickly reviewed with the help of strategically placed cameras — and the TV audience could get a close look, sometimes in slow motion — the NFL grew receptive to trying instant replay.

Early replay was limited. Only officials could initiate a review. Cameras were less sophisticated than they are now, and relatively few were employed, meaning replay officials often did not get a definitive look at the play. Small wonder, then, that replay was not wildly popular, either with the NFL team owners or the fans.

It was ditched in 1992.

Several more seasons of whining by head coaches apparently softened the resistance, though. So, on further review, replay came back in the 1999 season, with modified rules and improved technology. One new wrinkle was a "coach's challenge," giving the head coach an opportunity to directly contest an official's call.

There are still restrictions in the replay system. Each team is permitted only two coach's challenges per game (although, if both are successful, a third is allowed). A coach cannot issue a challenge in the last two minutes of either half. The decision to review any questionable call occurring inside the two-minute warning comes from the replay official in the booth upstairs.

The challenging team must also have at least one of its three timeouts left, because it loses a timeout in the event of an unsuccessful challenge.

One piece of technology the NFL backed away from was the use of a vibrating pager for a coach to notify the referee that a challenge was being made. The pager gave way in 2004 to a decidedly more low-tech solution: Coaches now throw a red flag onto the field and yell at the ref to make their challenge known.

Far more viscerally satisfying, for sure.

Even in the new era, however, the kinds of plays subject to review are restricted. Replay is most often used to determine whether a fumble occurred (or whether the player was down by contact), whether a player got both feet down inbounds after making a catch, or whether the ball actually broke the plane of the goal line for a touchdown.

Penalty calls — holding, roughing the passer, pass interference, etc. — are not subject to review.

When a play is reviewed, the referee has 60 seconds to examine the replay on a sideline monitor. He views all available angles of the play and will only overturn a call if he sees "incontrovertible visual evidence" supporting a reversal.

If the call is overturned, the referee determines where the ball is to be spotted and how much time is to be removed from or restored to the game clock. If the official's call is upheld, the game resumes where it was, and the challenging team is docked a timeout.

While the benefits of replay are fairly obvious, there are drawbacks. For one thing, an argument can be made that the human factor — in this case a blown call that costs a team dearly — is part of the game, part of its lore. The players are certainly human and screw up all the time: dropped balls, fumbles, bad passes, missed blocks, crummy tackling. Imperfection, a purist might argue, comes with the territory.

And even with state-of-the-art camera technology, the system remains imperfect. Rarely does an offseason pass without the league's competition committee taking up some aspect of instant replay.

Also, in a game that many people feel is already overregulated and occasionally made ponderous by too much technology, instant replay is not "instant." It means an additional stoppage of play. Despite rules meant to speed the process, delays of several minutes or more are not unknown.

If you're pounding a few brewskis with your pals down at the local watering hole, maybe this isn't so bad. If you're sitting in the end zone in Buffalo in mid-December, stripped to the waist and painted blue with a big white "B" scrawled on your chest, it's a different story.

Unless, of course, you're more hammered than the guy pounding the brewskis.

Source: Various

Photo: NFL referee Jeff Triplette uses the sideline "instant replay booth" to check a call that was challenged. (Ron Sachs/Corbis)

This post is a less-than-instant replay of a March 11, 2009, Wired.com article.