Instant Replay’s Trolley Problem

It was overtime, tie game, under a minute to go. Kansas had possession until the ball squirted out of bounds. Kansas forward Silvio De Sousa dove for it. So did Duke’s Javin DeLaurier. The refs said De Sousa touched it last; Duke ball.

But then refs stepped in and the play went under review, after which they realized that DeLaurier had gotten a dermal cell on it. Kansas took possession, nailed a three, and never looked back.

All of which created something like the Trolley Problem for replay haters: If replay reverses an incorrect call, changes the outcome of a game, and costs Duke a trip to the Final Four, then surely it must be good for you, me, and the American people.

And yet I still hold to my conviction that, on balance, instant replay is bad.

(1) Replay review destroys the flow of games and the dynamical meaning of sports. Time, in sports, has great meaning. You can feel this either as observer or participant. When you’re an athlete, time is the decisive factor: If you had the power to stop the clock, then anyone could find the open man, make the right cut, see the lane. Game speed is what makes everything hard. Talk to athletes in just about any sport that involves a ball and they’ll tell you that when they say they were “in the zone,” what they really mean is that they were in a cognitive place where time moved a little more slowly for them and they were able to see the game a little more clearly than usual.

This element of time is meaningful to fans, too. Games have a flow. The flow both expresses and influences the play. If you stop time for arbitrary reasons—TV timeouts are another example—then you are changing the game. Which is precisely what instant replay does: It monkeys with the dynamical meaning of the game at key inflection points. At least that’s how I think George Will would say it.

For the rest of us, this just means that replay takes a moment when the tension in a game should be unbearably great and lets all of the air out of the balloon. Everything stops. The players stand around. The refs look sullen and confused. And then, instead of ratcheting up the excitement, the game has to kickstart itself after the replay boys get things sorted out.

It’s miserable.

(2) The gains replay gives you in accuracy are marginal. The big argument for replay is that “it gets the calls right.” And after all, who could ever be in favor of wrong calls?

But the vast majority of calls at any professional level are right. Replay merely ratifies that fact. The gains you pick up in the occasional correction are all at the margins. And the cost—screwing up the game experience—happens every. Single. Time.

(3) There is metaphysical question of what we want from sports: Do we want perfection or humanity? I’m pretty sure that if we told Boston Dynamics that we wanted the greatest tennis player ever, within five years they could give us a robot who never loses a point. Is that what we want from sports?

But that’s what instant replay is right now. Human beings see at the equivalent of roughly 60 “frames per second.” Instant replay is done using super-slow motion on the order of magnitude of 40,000 frames per second. It’s not that referees make “mistakes” so much as they are not physically capable of seeing and judging the game the way modern cameras can.

So what do you want? Perfect calls or human calls? Roger Federer or the Tennis Bot?

At the end of the day, it’s not even close. I’ll take the human refs and the exhilarating climaxes. Even if it means a few calls that are incorrect by advanced technological standards. Even if it means another Final Four for Duke.

The price is high, but it’s one all true sports fans should be willing to pay.