Competition Committee Not Supportive Of Lions' Instant Replay Proposal
By Ashley Dunkak
@AshleyDunkak
CBS DETROIT - NFL clubs have submitted 18 rule proposals for review by the competition committee, and 13 of them relate to instant replay.
One of those submissions came from the Detroit Lions. The organization has proposed all fouls called by an official be subject to review.
St. Louis Rams head coach Jeff Fisher, a member of the committee, did not sound optimistic about the possibility of implementing such an overarching measure.
"We discussed this at length," Fisher said on a teleconference Wednesday. "Basically, to simplify things, your head coach is going to become the eighth official on the field. It's going to be our responsibility now to determine whether or not these were fouls or not fouls. This replay system was never designed to involve fouls.
"[Vice president of officiating] Dean [Blandino]'s doing a great job right now with improving the quality of officiating," Fisher continued. "We think we can take care of some of these issues on the field through that means rather than put ourselves in a standard where we're looking at plays where, like I said earlier, the standard is so different when you're talking about on the field versus the frame-by-frame review. Again, we frame-by-framed a lot of things this past spring, and it's just not something that we support."
The Lions made their proposal in the wake of a pivotal pass interference call that went against Detroit in its playoff loss to the Dallas Cowboys. With the Lions leading in the fourth quarter, a flag was thrown for pass interference, but later the flag was picked up without explanation.
At the time, the Lions did not hide their aggravation at the way the situation played out, and head coach Jim Caldwell joined general manager Martin Mayhew in calling for change.
"The fact of the matter is that it's a controversial call, and I think without question that it was one that it was probably not officiated correctly, in my estimation," Caldwell said in January. "With modern times where we have technology that can take out the human factor in certain key situations, in big games ... we should use that technology to do so, to kind of set the record straight and take the human error out of it, so perhaps from this endeavor we'll find a way to maybe improve that portion of the game.
"It may have to be [limited] for the sake of time and those kind of things in a game, how long a game lasts, that you have to have some boundaries … but I do think that particularly in big games and down the stretch, in playoffs and things of that nature, I'm not certain there should be a limit on when you can review, when you can look at to make certain that you got the call right," Caldwell continued. "I just think that we're all human, and we're all affected by our surroundings and environment, big game issues, noise, et cetera, and it's going to be hard for anybody to convince me otherwise, and I think in that particular case we should try to take as much of the human factor out as we possibly can."
