I saw some threads discussing poor reffing . . . again.

Everyone needs to understand that the refs are going to miss calls. That will never change until the end of football. Even if suddenly all of the refs were superior at their jobs, they would STILL miss calls, because there are only 7 officials on the field, and there are typically 11 different battles going on on any given play. And refs are human. They can only see the play from one angle, can be obstructed by other players on the field, and all of this is happening in mere seconds or fractions of a second.

But I do think it’s interesting to discuss whether challenging penalties should be allowed. For example, what if this rule were added:

• You can challenge whether a specific penalty occurred and was not called, or whether a called penalty should not have been called.
• As with existing challenges, there must be incontrovertible evidence to overturn the ruling on the field.
• The challenges count against your total number of challenges for the game.
• No change in the number of challenges allowed per game, or the other rules around challenges.

To me, this has good potential to reverse the most grievous and consequential of bad penalty calls or penalty non-calls, while not slowing the game down any further. I think the risk of coaches frivolously challenging penalties is low, because:

• You have limited challenges.
• If you use them you risk losing a timeout.
• You have relatively little time between plays to review.

If you want to ease into it, maybe at first you only allow it for reversal of a called penalty.

Thoughts?