It’s time to terminate replay officials

Here’s a way to make sure future college replay officials don’t get the death threats that Gordon Riese has received in Portland in the wake of Oregon’s controversial win over Oklahoma.

Get rid of replay officials. Or at least get rid of them as the ultimate authority in college football.

In the past, I have applauded the college game for having a mechanism for overturning improper calls without putting it on the head coaches the way the NFL does with its challenge system.

But the college system was bound to generate a firestorm with its decision to use local officials as the arbiters of these replay decisions. Imagine Michigan at Ohio State in November with the Rose Bowl and a possible national championship on the line, and the replay official is some out-of-work ref from Columbus, Ohio.

Think there’s any chance for the appearance of impropriety there?

Three changes in the system would do wonders for making this thing function properly and for ridding the game of conspiracy theories.

One easy change is for replay officials to be flown in from neutral sites, which some conferences already practice. How expensive is that in the billion-dollar industry of college football?

Next is to use the officials only to summon the referee when he thinks a ruling needs to be challenged. Then let the referee, possibly with the help of two of his fellow officials, make the ruling on the sideline.

The officiating crew that is suspended for one game following the incident at Oregon could have corrected its mistakes had it been given the chance to view the replay. Maybe they would have seen what was obvious to everyone but Riese.

Third comes the most important part.

Make the referee accountable immediately following the game.

Everyone else is. The 19-year-old wide receiver is. The 62-year-old head coach is.

A rational explanation for not giving Oklahoma the ball on the onside kick and for not overturning the pass interference call would have done wonders to defuse a situation that grew so out of control as to have a university president calling for the game to be erased and for knucklehead OU fans to be making death threats to the replay official.

Of course, I don’t think there is a rational explanation for either of those calls. If you have seen them, they are about as crystal clear as these things can be. But it would have been interesting to hear.

In all sports, more immediate accountability from game officials should be mandated.

In the NBA, officials are allowed to talk to a pool reporter following a game, but there is nothing that compels them to. They can clam up if they choose.

The same is true in Major League Baseball.

Ryan Howard’s pursuit of 60 home runs was delayed during the weekend when umpire Larry Poncino ruled a double on what perhaps should have been a home run.

This was much less clear than the calls in the OU game. A fan reaching across the yellow line with a glove is a nearly impossible call for an umpire standing 200 feet away. But afterward Poncino issued a statement saying it was a home run.

Good to get that apology, although the next day he said he never made that statement. It had been issued by a locker room attendant who said that Poncino had said, “The ball was over the fence, and that’s it.”

Nice system of communications there.