Ethical Sports Takes

Technology was supposed to help officials fix the calls everyone knew were wrong. Somewhere along the way, sports decided that wasn’t enough.

There is no question that technology has made sports better. Instant replay can correct a terrible call. Goal-line technology can tell us whether the ball actually crossed the line. Hawk-Eye can determine whether a tennis ball was in or out. We now have camera angles and tracking systems capable of seeing things the human eye simply cannot.

All of that sounds great.

The problem is that sports have become obsessed with getting everything perfect.

From Fixing Mistakes to Searching for Them

Replay makes the most sense when something clearly went wrong.

A receiver obviously caught the football but was ruled incomplete? Fix it. A basketball went off one player but possession was awarded to the other team? Fix it. A soccer ball completely crossed the goal line and the referee missed it? Fix it.

That is technology improving sports.

But remember the Seahawks-Rams game last season? On a two-point conversion, Sam Darnold threw what essentially everyone on the field believed was an incomplete pass. The play appeared to be over, but replay stepped in. Officials went back, determined that Darnold’s pass had technically traveled backward, ruled it a lateral, and because Zach Charbonnet had recovered the loose ball in the end zone, Seattle was awarded the game-tying two points.

That is not what replay was created for.

Nobody watched that play in real time and thought an obvious mistake had just occurred. Technology didn’t step in to correct something everyone could see was wrong. It went searching through the play and found something that nobody was even looking for.

The ruling may have been technically correct according to the rules. That’s not the point.

Replay was supposed to protect sports from obvious officiating mistakes, not discover outcomes that practically nobody on the field knew had even happened.

When technology starts creating controversies that wouldn’t exist without the technology itself, we have probably gone too far.

And that isn’t just an NFL problem.

We regularly stop games so officials can stare at slow-motion footage from five different angles trying to determine whether a player’s fingertip touched the ball a fraction of a second after somebody else’s.

At that point, are we correcting an obvious mistake or actively searching for one?

There is a difference.

Slow Motion Changes What We See

One of the biggest problems with modern replay is that we judge actions occurring at full speed by watching them frame by frame.

Something that looks completely normal in real time can look dramatically different when slowed down enough.

A tiny movement becomes obvious. A brief piece of contact looks significant. A player’s hand may remain on a basketball for one additional frame. A foot might move by an amount nobody in the stadium could possibly notice.

Technically, replay might arrive at the correct decision according to the rulebook.

But sports were never played one frame at a time.

The Pursuit of Perfect Officiating

Human officials make mistakes. That has always been part of sports.

Technology should reduce those mistakes, but I don’t think the goal should be eliminating every possible officiating error because I’m not sure that is even possible.

The more technology improves, the more things we become capable of reviewing. And once something can be reviewed, eventually somebody will argue that it should be reviewed.

Then we need more cameras. More angles. More tracking. More reviews.

There has to be a line somewhere.

Technology Can Also Hurt Trust

There is another side of excessive replay that sports leagues have to think about: gambling.

People wager enormous amounts of money on sports. That means every touchdown, basket, goal, penalty, and possession can have money attached to it for somebody watching.

Now imagine a game stopping for several minutes while officials look at a play from every possible angle. The longer the review goes, the more everyone sits around wondering what they are looking for. Then the ruling finally comes down and completely changes the outcome of the play.

If the decision goes against someone’s team or bet, it becomes very easy for that person to start asking, “How did they even find that?” or worse, “Is this rigged?”

That doesn’t mean the game actually is rigged. But perception matters.

Technology was supposed to give fans more confidence that the correct calls were being made. If excessive replay instead leaves people more suspicious about how a decision was reached, then technology is beginning to accomplish the exact opposite.

Sports will always have controversial calls. Sometimes accepting an imperfect decision made in real time may actually be healthier for the game than stopping everything for five minutes trying to manufacture absolute certainty.

The more complicated we make officiating, the harder it becomes for fans to trust what they are watching.

Tennis Might Have Gotten It Right

Tennis is actually a good example of technology fitting naturally into a sport.

Was the ball in or out?

There is a clear answer.

Technology can handle that type of objective decision extremely well. The same applies to things like determining whether a ball completely crossed a goal line.

That is very different from asking technology to determine whether contact was enough for a foul, whether a defender interfered with a receiver, or whether an action violated the spirit of a rule.

Technology is excellent at measuring.

It is much less useful when we ask it to replace judgment.

Technology Has Helped Sports, But We Have Gone Too Far

I don’t want sports to get rid of replay.

Quite the opposite.

Use technology to fix the mistakes that matter. Use it for objective decisions where there is a clear answer. Use it when an official obviously missed something that could change the outcome of a game.

But we don’t need to examine every play like we are investigating a crime scene.

If it takes three minutes, twelve replays, a super slow-motion camera, and a zoomed-in image to discover that the original call was technically wrong, maybe the original call wasn’t bad enough to overturn in the first place.

Technology should protect sports from obvious human error. It shouldn’t remove the human element from sports entirely.

The goal should be getting the important calls right, not achieving a level of perfection that probably doesn’t exist.

Same game. Different perspective.

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