The NFL has decided to do away with pass interference replay in 2020, which is not a surprise to anyone who watched the 2019 season. The overall impact of making pass interference calls and no-calls reviewable was not positive, and one of the NFL’s top executives says he deserves some of the blame for that.
NFL vice president of football operations Troy Vincent told Peter King of NBC Sports that the pass interference review was a failure. He said the fact that officials became such a huge part of the conversation proved the league “didn’t do the proper due diligence.”
“We failed. I’m first in line. I shared that [with league officials]. I failed, as the leader of that department. I failed,” Vincent admitted. “We cannot allow that to happen again. What did we learn from that? We’ve got to do our due diligence. You can’t rush and just shove something in there without knowing all the consequences. And we found that out last year, live and in action, publicly.
“We didn’t do [our due diligence] last year, and we failed, and we failed miserably.”
Vincent made the comments in the context of talking about the new “Sky Judge” proposal, which calls for the addition of a full-time booth official who can intervene if a call on the field was missed or the wrong call was made. Owners will vote on the proposal Thursday, and Vincent is skeptical that there are enough competent officials in the NFL’s “pipeline” to make that happen.
“The concept of the eighth man in the booth has some merit,” Vincent said. “But we just don’t have the pipeline [of officials] today. Can we get there? Yes. But today, it could be a challenge.”
Overall, the ability of coaches to review pass interference calls and no-calls last season ended up being a sham. There were 101 such replays initiated either by coach’s challenges or booth reviews, and the call on the field was changed just 21 times. Referees consistently showed an unwillingness to change the call on the field, even when it was blatantly obvious that the wrong call was made or a call should have been made.
The NFL only decided to experiment with reviewing pass interference plays after one of the worst no-calls in football history cost the New Orleans Saints a trip to the Super Bowl. The rule change was a direct response to public pressure, and Vincent is right that making immediate adjustments under those types of circumstances is a recipe for disaster.
