(10)
If the Miami-Buffalo game here is typical of the NFL product these days, you're going to have a lot of time to kill. And you can blame the league's replay challenge for that.
The merits of the replay challenge are debatable. Even with all those camera angles, the officials still get it wrong while taking time off our lives we'll never get back.
Regardless, the world of pro sports is convinced that it's necessary. After all, there are point spreads, I mean, victories hanging in the balance.
But if replay challenge is a necessary evil, then surely an organization as successful as the NFL can find a better way to do it.
Let's examine an 11-minute period during yesterday's New York Giants-Washington Redskins game, a stretch of tedium that no doubt had many viewers praying for a quick death.
A Giants pass was ruled incomplete as the two-minute warning sounded in the second quarter and seconds before Fox sent viewers to over two minutes of commercials.
When things resumed, viewers learned that New York had challenged the call. After a glut of replays and shots of semi-animated coaches standing on the sidelines, the play was overruled – almost four minutes after the original call.
But wait, it gets worse.
About two minutes later, the Giants came up short on fourth-and-one. Or so the officials said.
You guessed it, another review. After more replays and more shots of the coaches, we learned that the officials got it right the first time.
That's 3 minutes and 13 seconds more wasted for no good reason.
If you thought this was all some sort of high drama that kept viewers on the edge of their seats, here's the statistical breakdown of that 11 minutes:
Replays: 7
Shots of coaches: 8
Actual football plays: 7
Included in that sorry total was 6:21 spent on reviewing two plays.
Is it any wonder that so many NFL games are running past the three-hour mark? Heck, that's 1.5 NBA games or the first five innings of a World Series game.
The NHL has found a way to make replay review quick, painless and in most cases correct. During Saturday night's NCAA football game between Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, a play was reviewed in 76 seconds.
It takes NFL officials that long just to stick their heads into the replay camera.
The NFL is in the entertainment business. There's nothing entertaining about this.
