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Kevin SeifertNFL Nation
INDIANAPOLIS — The NFL competition committee has spent the past two days discussing the present and future of replay review but has reached no consensus about whether to change it, several members said Tuesday. For the most part, conversations here at the scouting combine have rehashed previously-rejected ideas.
Committee chairman Rich McKay joked that the topic has come up every year “since like 1986,” and Dallas Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones said there aren’t many new ideas to consider.
“We’ve had these conversations,” Jones said. “And you start rehashing them, and you go, ‘Oh my gosh, we’ve had this conversation again and again and again and again and again.”
In recent years, the committee and most owners have rejected plans that would expand replay, by adding new categories of eligible plays, and/or add an eighth official to each game’s crew. Neither garnered enough support to move to a full vote of owners.
The new variable in 2019, of course, is whether a missed pass interference call in the NFC Championship Game will add any urgency to adopt previously rejected plans. Officials’ failure to flag Los Angeles Rams cornerback Nickell Robey-Coleman in the fourth quarter had a direct impact on the Rams’ 26-23 overtime victory over the New Orleans Saints. Jones said that call has created “energy” to discuss a system that does not allow reviews of penalties or non-calls.
In the larger picture, however, Jones noted that mistakes are part of the fabric of the game. Notably, no one involved in the decision — not commissioner Roger Goodell, nor any member of the competition committee — have expressed public support for expanding replay or adding an official.
“Over the course of time,” Jones said, “everybody gets affected by a call, by a player making a mistake, by a coach making a bad decision. Those things happen.”
McKay said he expects several teams to propose “significant” changes to replay but indicated that the committee’s discussions will center more on “tweaks” that could give the system more capacity to correct obvious mistakes. Last month’s missed call provided a natural impetus for discussion, but McKay did not commit to anything beyond that and said he did not think the committee would reach a consensus until the March 24-27 owners meetings.
“Given the significance of the play, and the focus on that error late in the game, you need to have a top-down discussion again,” McKay said. “I think that’s the right thing to do. When you have it, you may come up with some ideas to modify replay, add to, subtract from, whatever it may be. I think that’s a healthy discussion.
“And also, I think you’re going to have some people who have historically wanted to expand replay and want to use this moment to have that discussion, which I don’t blame them for wanting to do. For any discussion about it, you have to go all the way through, meaning end to end, because there are so many complications to it, in the way it impacts the game, officiating, time of game, pace of game, all those things. We are going to do that.”