Man in Replay Booth Shouldn’t Pass Judgment

And so the two powerful forces move dangerously closer, their orbits nearly touching, a calamitous collision impending.

A botched instant replay call and the Super Bowl.

A champion who shouldn’t be a champion.

A season decided by a machine.

Is this the NFL or the BCS?

They are starting to look the same, and if you don’t think Feb. 3 could end up as tainted as Jan. 3, then think again.

Things began growing ominous on Dec. 16 when a replay official may have cost the Cleveland Browns a playoff spot, leading to a misguided bottle-throwing rebellion of humans against technology.

On Saturday, a mere two weeks before the Super Bowl, things got worse.

A replay official pushed the Oakland Raiders out of the playoffs. Pure and simple and scary.

After defeating the New England Patriots in a divisional playoff game in the snow, the Raiders were robbed of their victory by a league employee who never felt a flake.

A Tom Brady fumble became an Immaculate Incompletion.

A team that should be in next week’s AFC championship game and that maybe was savvy enough to win it, is not.

A shakily officiated season--remember how the replacements were better than the regular officials?--has become downright tainted.

And now, it officially makes sense to begin wondering.

What happens if the same things happen in New Orleans?

What if the St. Louis Rams score the winning touchdown in the final minute against the Pittsburgh Steelers ... but after the ensuing kickoff, the replay official stops the game and takes the points off the scoreboard because he has decided that Marshall Faulk’s right toe was out of bounds?

That’s what happened in Cleveland, a play overruled after another play had been run.

Or, what happens if Kurt Warner fumbles the ball while trying to tuck it in on the Rams’ final comeback drive, and Pittsburgh recovers, and the Steelers essentially win the championship, and nobody complains ... and then a replay official calls it a forward pass?

And the Rams get the ball again.

And the Rams win.

That’s exactly what happened Saturday, on a call so horrendous that average fans have found themselves uttering what was previously the most demented sentence in the pro football parlance.

Maybe Al Davis is right.

OK, so to suggest that the NFL has a conspiracy against the Raiders is as silly as suggesting that Davis actually jogs in those white silk jogging suits.

But by leaving replay in the hands of the league in the last two minutes of a game leaves the league open to plenty of questions.

The first being, of course, dealing with Saturday night.

What were they thinking?

When the Patriots’ Tom Brady was hit by the Raiders’ Charles Woodson with 1:47 remaining and the Raiders leading, 13-10, he had clearly ended any intention of passing and had tucked the ball toward belly.

Millions saw a football in Brady’s right passing hand touching his left hand, which must constitute a tuck. If even the wacky rules don’t make that clear, common sense should.

So when the ball popped out, it was a fumble. And when Greg Biekert fell on it for the Raiders, considering the Patriots were out of timeouts, it was a victory and advancement into the AFC championship game.

The officials called it. The celebrating Raiders knew it. The dejected, uncomplaining Patriots knew it.

If the rules allowed for coach’s replay challenges in the final two minutes, there would not probably have even been a Patriot challenge.

But this was not about Bill Belichick. This was about Rex Stuart.

Rex Stuart?

He’s a replay official. Upstairs on television, he saw it as an incompletion.

He then summoned referee Walt Coleman, who felt who-knows-how-much pressure to agree with his peer and change the decision and also see it as an incompletion.

“[Brady] would have had to have brought [the football] all the way in and then it comes out,” Coleman told reporters. “Then it would have been a fumble.”

But, again, the ball was touching both hands at the time of the hit. How much farther in must it get?

A handful of plays later, the Patriots kicked a field goal to tie the score, then they won it, 16-13, on their first possession of overtime.

The snow, the comeback and the rip-off will combine to make it probably the most memorable game this season.

Not to mention, it is the first incident in nearly 30 years that reminds Raider fans of what has been voted the most memorable finish in NFL history. That was the “Immaculate Reception,” when the Steelers defeated the Raiders in a 1972 playoff game after Franco Harris ran for the winning touchdown after picking up a pass that had ricocheted off either Steeler Frenchy Fuqua or Raider Jack Tatum.

Replays were inconclusive, but many of those Steelers on the field later admitted that the ball bounced only off Fuqua, making Harris’ reception illegal under league rules at the time.

Fuqua has said he will go to his grave without acknowledging exactly what happened.

Late Saturday, when asked by reporters if he was throwing the ball, Brady eerily sounded the same way.

“If he hit me, I was going to throw it,” he told reporters, allegedly stifling a grin. “How do you like that?”

And you wonder why the Raiders are paranoid?

“People say that what goes on between Al Davis and the league doesn’t affect what happens on the field,” Raider Tim Brown told reporters. “But there’s no way that you can tell me that that’s so.”

Again, that’s silly. But the changes that need to be made after this season’s two replay debacles are not.

It’s not just about the rules of incompletions and fumbles. It’s about the rules of replay.

There should be no more challenges strictly from the booth. Even in the last two minutes. Especially in the last two minutes.

Either the play is reviewed by request of one of the two coaches, or not at all.

Replay works when participants have control. It fails when they don’t.

If that rule was in effect this season, the debacles in Cleveland and New England would have been avoided.

And if coaches have used up all their requests by the end of the game and they lose on a bad call? At least it is a human being with mud on his shirt making that call, a frailty that worked just fine for football’s first several decades.

The NFL is insulting its fans by permitting games to be decided by guys in front of televisions.

Just wait until that game is the Super Bowl.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com

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Controversy in the Air

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