It went generally unnoticed, just as it did the first time, but this year’s Army-Navy football game marked the 60th year that instant replay has been used during televised sporting events.
There were more compelling distractions on Dec. 7, 1963, when that game was played. It followed a one-week postponement because of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. No one could have guessed, or cared, how much a few replays of game action would impact the future of television and the games it broadcast.
Tony Verna, the director and producer for CBS Sports, is credited with inventing instant replay, and its first exposure came via a 1,300-pound videotape machine during the historic game, which saw Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Roger Staubach lead Navy to a 21-15 win. It was a lot more than just the start of something new. Along with Verna’s invention came the inevitable Pandora’s box.
What might have appeared like a novel experiment instead paved the way for how games are presented on television today. Some still question the price of progress, but like it or not, make no mistake that instant replay is part of the sports culture today and not only isn’t going away, history has told us it almost certainly will grow.
It comes as no surprise to note that the NFL served as not only an innovator, but also the guinea pig for the use of instant replay to help improve officiating. But it didn’t happen overnight, though sometimes it seemed that way. While television revised, improved and expanded use of “reruns,” the league experimented with preseason games as early as 1978 and eventually adopted what proved to be a trial run in 1986.
“What happened was television kept showing plays over and over that people watching at home could see, and fans in the stands were in the dark,” said Ernie Accorsi, former general manager of the Baltimore Colts who had the same position with the Cleveland Browns at the time. “When the question came up about how it could be done, Art [Modell, the Browns owner], pointed out, ‘We already have it.'”
It was just a matter of making it work, and implementation in many ways is still in progress. Accorsi, who worked in the Orioles’ front office for six months after leaving the Browns (again, before the team left town), was recruited by George Young to be his handpicked successor as GM of the New York Giants in 1994.
That was three years after 17 owners voted against the use of instant replay. It took another seven years before it was restored, much to Young’s dismay.
“George was adamantly against instant replay,” Accorsi said. “He always said it would open the Pandora’s box and eventually it would expand to everything.”
It hasn’t quite gotten to that point, but the original concept, which restricted reviews to plays of possession, out-of-bounds plays and any infractions “easily detectable” (too many men on the field), has grown significantly throughout the years.
“Technology is only going to get better,” Accorsi said. “Where it helps the most is with sideline plays where the judge has to see if the receiver has the ball in control and both feet inbounds. It can be impossible to see both. I don’t know what the numbers are, but I would imagine that’s the area where [instant replay] helps the most. I just don’t think instant replay was meant to be done frame by frame and the hope is it doesn’t get to the point of having everything reviewable.”
That “frame by frame” description Accorsi mentioned comes into play more with baseball, a game that offers many more opportunities for discussion, which is probably the main reason Major League Baseball was the last of the four major professional sports to adopt instant replay. The National Hockey League got on board in 1991 and the National Basketball Association in 2002. MLB began reviewing home run calls in 2008, then expanded replay in 2014.
Like football, MLB started out with the basics — home runs, whether they were fair or foul, left the park, or if there was fan interference. As predicted, and expected, that didn’t last very long. With so many options available, just about everything baseball has to offer is subject for review — except for balls and strikes, which may not be far away if those in favor of automation have their way.
If it comes as a surprise to learn there was an average of only 1.32 replays per game (7,754 replays in 5,880 games) between 1999, when the NFL brought instant replay back for good, and 2021, the MLB numbers for last year qualify as a shocker. There were a total of 1,261 challenges and 173 crew reviews in 2,430 regular-season games. Those are the most prominent plays where frame-by-frame video comes into play.
The tag play in particular presents the highest number of plays for which instant replay wasn’t intended, in particular those where a fielder effectively pushes a runner off the base. It is a constant search for the unattainable — perfection.
“A human being cannot perform at the level [MLB wants],” said John Hirschbeck, who retired in 2016 after serving 22 years as a major league umpire. “I don’t know if it’s society or just a younger generation, but everything is expected to be perfect.
“It used to be, the ball gets to the base first, the runner’s out, he gets there first he’s safe and we move on. You don’t want players getting hurt. Now they teach holding the tag, and you can’t really tell how much pressure is applied, and if he goes off the base by an inch he’s out.”
By actual count, the 1,434 plays that were either challenged or reviewed fell into 12 different categories. That is an extremely high number, and the most ridiculous is that “hit by pitch” was the third-highest number (115), representing almost 10 percent of the reviews.
As crazy at it seems, there’s insufficient evidence to suggest that instant replay has had much of a negative effect on the length of games, which have increased in all sports and at every level throughout the years. That actually seems to be true mostly in baseball, which had an average of 3 hours and 3 minutes per nine-inning game last year and is constantly looking for ways to shorten games.
Since football handled coaches running on the field with a 15-yard penalty, odds are that arguments by managers in baseball used up much more than the two minutes of average time for a challenge.
Instant replay has been around a long time now. Whether it’s better or not is in the mind of the observer, but it’s not going anywhere. I think we can agree there is “indisputable evidence” that is a fact.
Jim Henneman can be reached at JimH@pressboxonline.com
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Navy Athletics
Issue 278: December 2022 / January 2023
Originally published Dec. 21, 2022