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Goodbye, pass interference review: What could the NFL do now?
The NFL's pass interference replay review rule, implemented ahead of the 2019 season, is dead. What comes next for the league's officiating department?
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Lots of Payton quotes in this article.
Riveron's struggles to find a standard were evident as early as Week 2, when he failed to add a flag to an obvious miss in a Monday Night Football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers. Whether in reality or appearance, or both, the NFL punted the rule from that point on.
For most of the season, Riveron appeared to be using an impossibly high standard for overturn. I've spoken to two knowledgeable officiating sources who independently identified about 50 pass interference calls that Riveron judged incorrectly on any reasonable scale of review. Overall, the NFL reviewed 101 pass interference calls or non-calls and overturned 24.
CFL executives said it took nearly three years before they found a comfortable standard for reviewing pass interference. The NFL couldn't be that patient.
"I think the theory behind what the league voted on certainly had a chance to be successful," Payton recently told 105.7 FM in Baltimore. "But quite honestly, we weren't ready in New York to handle it. And I know that sounds critical, but that's just a fact. The consistency and the ability to take in the calls and at least come up with a fairly level basis of what we're going to interpret that call on. And if we're not ready there, then we shouldn't have it. And I think that's the feeling that all of us have right now, including myself."
In the end, the NFL barreled into this experiment unprepared and split at best on its potential efficacy -- a classic case of preferring the appearance of a solution rather than doing the hard work of building one that would work. Doubling down on a sky judge too soon would risk a repeat of the 2019 disaster.
Instead, the NFL has focused its offseason on realigning the leadership structure that contributed to the problem. It in essence demoted Riveron and replaced him with a committee of executives who all report to Vincent. Longtime assistant coach Perry Fewell joined the league office in a role that league sources described as supervising the officiating department's day-to-day operations, an unusual job for someone who has never officiated. But in practice, retired referee Walt Anderson -- hired as senior vice president of training and development -- has assumed control over the tasks normally charged to the NFL's officiating chief, from hiring and firing on-field personnel to making crew assignments.
"From what we can tell," said NFL Referees Association executive vice president Scott Green, "Walt is basically running the day-to-day operations as we've always known it, whether it was Mike Pereira, Dean Blandino or Al Riveron."
Anderson might well be a bridge to the next generation of leadership for the officiating department. The NFL tried to rehire Blandino this spring, but the sides could not reach an agreement.
Whoever runs the operation in the long term, however, will know that replay review of pass interference is dead, as is the likelihood of any near-future expansion into reviewing subjective calls. To that, I say good riddance for a league that isn't ready to handle it. This revelation doesn't alleviate the problem, but for the already-stressed preparations for the 2020 season, we should consider it addition by subtraction.
At least Riveron was demoted.