Replay gone wild?
The General at The Corporate Headquarters of the San Antonio Gunslingers brings an important issue to our attention:
I don't know how the dude in the booth escaped from Vaught-Hemingway without having his eyes ripped out and chewed up by the Orgeron. I've scoured the NCAA rulebook, and I can find no authority allowing the replay official to throw a flag that was not thrown on the play.Apparently a receiver went out of bounds and then came back in and caught a pass which would normally result in an "illegal touching" penalty. Except the refs on the field missed it. The booth official caught it and the penalty was assessed. But the General brings up a good point:
This seems to set a dangerous precedent. Can every play now be reviewed to see if, say, the officials missed a holding call on the offensive line?
Mentioned in Austin Murphy's book 
4 comments:
this is crazy. ole miss got jobbed. also, i'm not sure it even matters once the defensive player touches the ball first.
because the bama player touched it first, the receiver is then able to catch it....i think.
irregardless, it is indeed a dangerous precedent to allow the refs to assess penalties in the replay booth. a dubious ending to an otherwise competitive game.
They didn't scour the rulebook hard enough.
http://www.secsports.com/doc_lib/fbc_replay_policy.pdf
Under "Reviewable Plays"
2. Passing Plays:
b. Touching of a foward pass by an ineligible receiver.
Also:
3. Other Detectable Infractions
d. Number of Players on the field.
Yes...interesting.
I had never seen that done before either. When a play is reviewed, the refs are authorized to review the whole sequence leading up to the catch? So even if the play is being reviewed to determine whether or not it is a catch, they can also review the so called eligibility of that receiver and other things?
It was a pretty tough call to end the game on either way.
The eligibility of receivers is reviewed pretty regularly. Typically it happens when the QB tosses the ball in to an offensive lineman and the review has to determine if the ball was touched by a defender first.
As for it being a tough call... I might agree if the receiver had just grazed the sideline. He didn't. He took no fewer than five steps completely OB and then jumped (from OB) over the DBs back toward the ball. The official was paying so much attention to the interference/no-interference call that he didn't even notice how egregiously Hodge ran out of bounds. This is precisely what replay is for.
I look at it this way: if Hodge follows the rules, he has to go all the way around the DB to get to the ball. He never would've had time to do that... so he cheated and got caught.
It's not the ref's fault that he ruined his eligibility by running OB, it's his.
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