Key Takeaways:
- Patriots coach Mike Vrabel says NFL needs to improve instant replay process
- Vrabel is a member of the NFL Competition Committee
- Early Sunday games get less attention from officiating office than prime time games
- League executive Troy Vincent acknowledged issues with volume of reviews in 1 o clock window
Patriots coach Mike Vrabel says the league has to make its instant replay process better.
We need to evaluate staffing at that level to make sure every game is treated the same, whether it is the prime-time game on Sunday night, the prime-time game on Monday or Thursday or whether it is those 1 o clock games that is the lifeblood of our league, Vrabel said.
I think if we need to figure out staffing issues that need to be taken care of so those things are looked at and we are not letting anything slip. We need to be really good in replay. There are going to be mistakes on the field, just like there are mistakes in execution by the players, mistakes by the coaches, there are going to be mistakes by the officials. And they need to be decisive, they need to believe in what they are calling. But saying that there are going to be mistakes, we have to get to a system in replay that is as close to 100 percent accurate as possible.
NFL Executive VP of Football Operations Troy Vincent acknowledged this week that the volume of replay reviews in the 1 o clock Sunday window led to some reviews being wrong. That is a problem the league needs to fix.
Off the Record: Vrabel is right –family: Georgia, the 1PM games are the lifeblood of the NFL, and they deserve the same attention as the prime time games. It is frustrating as a fan to see obvious missed calls in early games while the Sunday Night Football crew seems to get it right more often. Is it because they have more time to review? Better officials? More resources? The NFL needs to figure this out because replay should be consistent regardless of game time. The fans in those early window games deserve the same quality of officiating.