The Southeastern Conference has the ambitious goal this football season of attaining a higher level of replay accuracy without increasing the length of games.
For the first time, the SEC will use a centralized video room at the league headquarters in Birmingham to assist replay decisions being made throughout the facilities of its 14 member institutions. Three individuals from the SEC’s officiating program will be in the video center with the sole focus of supporting the collaborative replay process.
SEC“Perfection is impossible, but we want to be consistent, and we want to be correct in the outcomes,” SEC coordinator of officials Steve Shaw said in a news conference last week at the league’s spring meetings in Destin, Fla. “We do not feel like these are going to add time to the game. We hope and we suspect that we’ll be quicker through the process.”
Neither Shaw nor league commissioner Greg Sankey, regardless of whether they’re in the video center or at a stadium, will take part in collaborative replay.
According to the SEC office, the replay official at each venue still will have primary responsibility to stop a game for review and will conduct the replay process as before. The difference moving forward will be the added element of the replay official being in constant contact with the three replay officials at the league’s video center during the review to assist in determining the correct outcome for the play in question based upon football rules and replay protocol.