Everyone hates officials. Wrong calls get made. No Calls happen all the time. And inconsistent officiating in a game can give the appearance of bias. What if instead of making every play reviewable for currently non-reviewable plays, teams could appeal to new york and get awarded penalty negations.

Essentially creating a system where if one team is getting away with penalties the other team starts getting awarded the ability to force a penalty to be declined.

Each team could have dedicated personnel reviewing plays during a game and submitting them to new york during a game. If new york agrees you get a penalty negating flag that a coach can throw to automatically overturn a penalty.

You might have to cap the number at say 2 penalty negations to avoid incentivizing plays that could lead to injury. Like if one team had like 6 penalty negations in their back pocket you would just rough the passer a ton on a drive and still have some left over. Just 2 would incentivizing saving them for important situations.

This could do a few things:

  • reduce the appearance of biased officiating. If the officials on the field are missing calls against one team well the other team gets rewarded for it.

  • reduce dubious penalties that cost teams in big spots. Nothing feels worse than feeling like a bad call, no call, or iffy call (like when a penalty isn’t getting called all game then suddenly gets called in the last few minutes of a close game) costs a team a win.

  • disincentivize flopping.

  • incentivize excessive celebration and taunting in blow outs, which are fun.

I think this would be in addition to the existing review system.

I also think maybe you limit the number of plays a team can appeal a lot of penalties occur in a gray area and don’t get called on most plays. So teams should only get a handful of plays to appeal. So that only really bad officiating mistakes earn a negation. An example might be the no call on an obvious face mask penalty.

  • stormy2587OPB
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    11 months ago

    Very fair criticism. Part of me is definitely thinking of this in sort of the most ideal way because its my idea. But another part of my is thinking the nfl would find a way to make any added bureaucracy even more infuriating. Like I can just imagine the monday morning statement from nfl officiating as to why a team wasn’t awarded a penalty negation on such and such a play.