The NCAA basketball tournament delivered a nail-biting finish on Monday night, as Florida edged Houston in the final moments. Yet as many hoops fans have discovered over the three-week spectacle known as March Madness, those “moments” often dragged on for minutes, as the referees engaged in go-to-the-monitor reviews of seemingly every close call and play.
The practice has already drawn attention in earlier rounds of the tournament, with the Wall Street Journal actually adding up the time spent on official reviews, finding a particularly risible example from the Arizona-Oregon game, where the final two minutes of play actually took 25 minutes to conduct.
As Paul Brazeau, the ACC senior associate commissioner for men’s basketball, told the paper, “Replay came into being in sports to fix egregious errors, and now it’s creeping into every single minute situation.”
In that regard, NCAA basketball is hardly alone. Indeed, it often feels as if all of major sports have become seduced by the promise of technological certainty, fearing that any blown call might alter the outcome in a way that triggers outrage from fans.
Determined to avoid such blowback and protect their multibillion-dollar franchises, sports and networks have responded by trying to avoid such lapses. The understandable desire to ensure that the referees got it right, however, comes at a cost, albeit one that’s hard to measure, since it can’t just be boiled down to ratings, which thus far haven’t exhibited any clear ill effects from the practice.
As several fans have observed via social media, the frequent and in some cases extended interruptions have a way of deadening the action, leaving announcers with too much time to vamp, while justifying the salaries that now practically every network pays to in-house officiating experts to review the reviewers.
Beyond those sitting through these intervals at home, though, there are also the fans in the actual arena, who don’t have the option of getting up and walking to the fridge — or changing the channel — when the game they’re attending comes to a screeching halt.
Writing in Mediaite, Colby Hall suggested the stoppages “nearly ruined” an otherwise splendid championship game, arguing that it’s “long past time that the system for checking calls got changed to improve the game flow and viewing experience.”
“Ruined” might be a little harsh, but “lessened” is certainly accurate, and the implications of that are worth considering not just before college basketball gets back into action, but before the upcoming NBA playoffs and NFL tip off and kick off, respectively.
Again, it’s easy to sympathize with the leagues’ desire to get everything right, capitalizing on the ability to replay key moments in super-slow-motion from a dizzying array of angles. If there has been one abiding truth in TV sports since Fox got its hands on the NFL in the 1990s, it’s that every technological toy with be used, copied and eventually abused.
The assumption has been that those bells and whistles enhance the experience for casual fans, and that the hardcore sports viewers will tune in no matter what. Obviously, there’s some validity in that, although again, it’s a difficult hypothesis to quantify around the fringes.
The bottom line, though, is that it’s never a great idea to annoy your core customers, and there ought to be some sort of happy medium in terms of providing the officials with a video-evidence backstop without triggering interminable stretches of dead air time.
In that sense, the NCAA tournament, thrilling as it often was, merely underscored one of the consistent lessons of TV viewing and media consumption in the age of modern technology — namely, just because you can doesn’t always mean that you should.