OT: Instant Replay is Of The Devil

Submitted by momo on

As the title suggests, Instant Replay is Of The Devil.

 

In the average person's imagination, Instant Replay serves a single purpose: to make games more fair. In fact it does no such thing. At the expense of human enjoyment (by prolonging games, often seemingly interminably) it simply offers a placebo effect: because we have instant replay, things must be better than if we did not have it.

 

This is not, in fact, the case.

 

Human ingenuity has brought us incredibly accurate slow-motion replay. Thanks to technological genius, most people with functioning vision clearly saw the Duke player's finger deviate from its natural position in a splayed hand configuration due to its contact with the ball. And yet, in utterly predictable fashion* the refs stuck with their original decision: Duke ball.

 

The "tell" of slow-motion replay and its status as opium for the barely-sentient mainstream sports-consuming masses is the fact that it only applies (for out-of-bounds decisions) in certain time periods. As we all know, two points scored at 13:40 count the same as two points scored at 1:32. And yet, for some reason, out-of-bounds decisions become critical in the last two minutes of the game. So critical, in fact, that refs must review them (and then ignore the slow motion evidence).

 

Instant replay is a crude tool, selectively applied for no good reason, which has no significant positive effect on the accuracy of rule application in sporting events, or at least not enough to counterbalance its annoyance effect as an interruption to the flow of the game. It is, when all is said and done, Of The Devil.

 

* Not at all meant to be an anti-Duke comment: refs get it wrong all the time and probably not, in the long term, in Duke's favor. The point of this rant is that instant replay doesn't really improve things enough to justify the boredom of waiting for the final verdict.

umumum

April 7th, 2015 at 1:17 PM ^

"opium for the barely-sentient mainstream sports-consuming masses"

Thank goodness you don't lack from an inferiority complex.