The Big Ten is about to join the rest of the Power 5 conferences in one regard.
The Big Ten is expected to have a centralized replay center available for the 2023 football season. A centralized replay center would allow in-game officials to communicate with a command center regarding replay reviews during games.
Purdue AD Mike Bobinski told On3’s Tom Dienhart that work is being done to have a site from where they will be able to conduct reviews this fall.
“Our intention is to move towards a centralized replay situation,” said Bobinski. “Its time has come here, in our opinion. There still will be someone on site and a set of eyes looking at replay, but there’ll be that collaboration between the command center and the on-field official.”
There are plans for the command center to be located in Chicago. They may work from an alternate site this fall.
Why didn’t the Big Ten previously have a command center to help with reviews? Previous commissioner Jim Delany, who served in the role until 2020, was concerned about an issue regarding favoritism based on who ran the command center.
Calls are always going to upset one school and make the other happy, so there’s no way around the favoritism issue. But at least the command center should help the conference improve their rulings on big plays.
