For as long as sports have been the world’s primary source of entertainment, their officials — from umpires to referees to judges — have made (or neglected to make) subjective calls, which regularly cause discord throughout the sports world. The introduction of large-scale instant replay in recent years, though, has done much to alleviate this subjectivity, and instant replay does make sports more credible on the whole. Major league baseball most recently made instant replay an integral part of games via a centralized replay center, and after the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) announced its own centralized replay center for its football programs, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) is now going to do the same.
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College football has spent years as not only the most popular collegiate sport in the US, but as the third most popular sport in the U.S. overall (behind just the NFL and MLB). So it is not entirely unprecedented for the ACC and SEC to experiment with centralized replay centers, which objectively help to make games more fair and accurate. However, these replay centers will not be used as the primary means with which calls are either confirmed or overturned in college football games, since instant replay is already available on the sideline at said games. Rather, the ACC and SEC replay centers (which will be located in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Birmingham, Alabama, respectively) are being created with “the idea [that] the replay official at the stadium would make the decision but collaboration would come from the off-site people… [The replay center] doesn’t change who makes the decision. It changes the capability for additional consultation.” This is in contrast to the MLB replay center, which is located in New York City and is the sole determinant for the outcome of a contested call. In essence, the college football replay centers are going to serve as an extra set of eyes that ensure maximum accuracy across America’s third most popular sport.
Alas, while centralized replay centers do plenty of good in taking subjectivity out of sports, not everything runs smoothly when it comes to expanding replay. For instance, MLB is currently mired in a predicament that juxtaposes the objectivity that replay brings to games with the inevitable increase in game time that also accompanies it. Both ACC and SEC football games will see a spike in game time due to centralized replay centers, simply because referees are forced to confer with an outside source — which certainly isn’t a logistical nightmare, but delays gameplay nonetheless.
Instant replay (and its many levels) is quickly becoming one of the most polarizing topics in all of sports since it seems to be necessary, but still doesn’t make play calling perfect and can turn sport-watching into a less enjoyable experience. But college football — particularly the ACC and SEC — clearly care more about getting calls right than anything else, which is indisputably the right decision for the college football world.