Video Review Needs to Happen Now

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

I think it's worth discussing exactly what a successful replay challenge should be able to accomplish, in order to more clearly distinguish between good and policies.
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So ultimately, having a replay system doesn't need to mean that everyone will always get rematches and slow the event to a crawl. Instead, it should be tailored to the situations for which it is usually advantageous (and then applied consistently), and should be made unavailable when it would most often be detrimental.

Tristan, I know you set out to discuss "exactly" what a successful replay challenge ... But, what you actually wrote is some high-level thoughts about how a system might work, in general.

To be successful, I think a replay system would have to describe (at the least) exactly what action the ref should take, for every single gameplay and scoring rule, whenever a challenge reverses a call involving that rule. The time when the original call occurred, and the match score when the call occurred might or might not need to be factored in for some situations.

I think there is a fairly large gap between where you ended, and what must be included in a mature, robust, system that produces consistent/predictable results.

I'm not pretending that I know the answer for this season, or for any other. It will be almost certainly be darned hard to produce a complete set of replay instructions each year. Attempting to create those instructions is an exercise left up to the readers (those readers who think reviewing video is a good idea).

IMO, the off-season experiments folks are planning for this year won't be successful unless/until they produce instructions corresponding to reach rule of this season's game. The alternative of asking the refs to fly by the seat of their pants during a tournament would not be a good idea.

Blake