SUPER BOWL XXIX : Bring It Back This Instant : NFL Is Divided, but Many Coaches Want TV Replay

The NFL is playing with fire this week as it heads toward another Super Bowl.

And the league is sure to get burned by its critics if the game turns on an officiating blunder that could have been corrected by instant replay.

The technology is in place. What the NFL lacks is the will to resume the process that was dropped three years ago to back up and, or if necessary, to override the judgment of the officials on the field.

The possibility of such a back-up process surfaced again this month during the early rounds of the playoffs, when three or four officiating errors stirred up the country.

“The problem is that the pro game has become almost too fast to officiate properly,” Joe Gibbs, the former coach of the Washington Redskins, said the other day. “It’s too fast not to use all the technology you have.”

Many coaches favor bringing back the instant-replay decision on controversial calls.

“My opinion hasn’t changed,” said Don Shula, coach of the Miami Dolphins and veteran chairman of the NFL’s competition committee. “Despite the problems it creates, instant replay--when we’ve used it--has been a plus for the league.”

An NFL majority has always sided with Shula. In the league’s most recent vote, 17 of the 28 clubs wanted instant replay again.

But it takes the affirmative votes of 21 of the 28 franchises to authorize the return of instant replay--and in recent ballots there have always been at least eight opposed.

They aren’t the same eight each time. And as is often the case with negative voters on controversial subjects that come before the NFL, they are loath to talk about it. So no one knows what’s ahead.

What killed instant-replay officiating last time was that the upstairs officials tried to be perfect on too many unimportant plays that delayed too many games, interfering with the entertainment for too many viewers.

Chances are, the league could eventually get the required 21 votes for instant replay if it made these changes:

--Narrow the focus: Football fans don’t care deeply about officiating mistakes on minor plays. What matters are the big blunders that everyone sees on television or scoreboard replays. If replay officials focused on the big ones and caught most of the mistakes that seem so glaring in replays, they might soon change the national perception that NFL officiating has never been worse.

And, according to Jerry Seeman, the NFL’s chief umpire, that is only a perception.

“Out of the (hundreds of plays) in pro football games this season, only 49 would have been reversed if we’d had instant replay,” Seeman said.

--Narrow the time limit: If an official’s call on the field isn’t found to be obviously wrong during the first instant replay or two, the game could proceed without delay.

The NFL allows offensive teams 40 seconds between plays. That is also the time frame instant replay officials should use. If they don’t see anything wrong in 40 seconds, the game goes on.

It is possible that later replays would uncover officiating mistakes. Indeed, some mistakes are found the next day when each club’s tapes are reviewed.

But football wasn’t meant to be delayed for two minutes or five minutes or 24 hours while searches are made for possible miscalls. Before television, it was never so delayed for two seconds.

The objective should be to catch the errors that are instantly observed by millions of fans.

--Review every play: When the NFL used instant-replay officiating in the 1980s, it allowed the upstairs official to reverse only selected plays, such as those involving change of possession.

But a blunder is a blunder. If and when the league restores its replay system, any and every big mistake, if found immediately, should be corrected.

Specifically, pass interference, exempt last time, should be included this time--if discovered by any official, upstairs or down.

--Add one more official: That is former all-pro Matt Millen’s suggestion.

“The NFL should put another official in the television truck,” Millen said. “That way, he could keep track of all the pictures the director sees on every play.”

A suggestion the NFL shouldn’t accept is the one allowing each coach a maximum of two challenges to officials’ calls.

The problem there is that even if a coach wins two challenges in the first half, he could still lose the game unfairly in the fourth quarter on a wrong call that he couldn’t challenge.

Former quarterback Pat Haden has a better idea--authorizing instant replay in the playoffs at least--and only later, maybe, in the regular season.

The case against Haden: If the league is going to use it at all, it should use it in every game. It’s irrelevant that the networks cover some games with more cameras than they take to other games. What’s relevant is the big blunder that is identified by any camera, at any game.

If there are mistakes that some folks don’t see, who’s to know?