This week’s Thursday Night Football game led to a remarkable discussion on the NFL command center and its replay review procedures. That came on a fourth-quarter punt from the San Francisco 49ers’ Mitch Wishnowsky, which led to an unsuccessful challenge, to broadcaster Prime Video showing a replay that seemed to conclusively prove the call should have been overturned, and to the NFL saying it didn’t have that replay in time.
And now, that’s led to finger-pointing about whose fault that is.
This situation started when Wishnowsky’s punt appeared to hit Seahawks’ returner Dee Williams’ fingers before being recovered by the 49ers’ Jalen Graham. But the on-field ruling was that the ball didn’t touch Williams, leading to Graham’s touch being ruled as downing the punt rather than recovering it. The 49ers challenged, but the call stood. Around that, though, Prime Video showed a replay that seemed to prove the ball did touch Williams, and rules analyst Terry McAulay (who works for Amazon on Thursdays as well as NBC on Sundays) questioned the lack of an overturn:
A little further on, this got stranger still. McAulay said on the broadcast he spoke to fellow former referee (and current NFL Officiating rules analyst) Walt Anderson in the league’s command center and Anderson told him the command center didn’t get the angle the broadcast showed before they made their decision and referee Craig Wrolstad announced it:
So, who’s to blame for that? On X, this led to a lot of immediate criticisms based on the idea that the command center had worse footage than viewers watching at home, with some even joking that the league is too cheap to pay Amazon for a Prime subscription. But comments after the game (which San Francisco won 36-24) from NFL vice president (officiating) Mark Butterworth to pool reporter ESPN Seahawks reporter Brady Henderson seemed to put the blame on Prime Video:
“After looking at all available angles, we made the determination that we were going to stand on the call because there was not clear and obvious video evidence,” Butterworth sayid. “Once Craig made his announcement and they came back from TV, the network had an enhanced shot that they did not send at all until after they played his announcement.
“They came back from TV break with the shot synced in the same box as his announcement,” and “Just to be clear, they did not share that angle with us through the review process.”
Butterworth also adds that they didn’t receive an explanation from Prime Video on what happened here.
The key questions here appear to be about what was specifically done to enhance this footage, when that was done, and what the process is for sending enhanced footage to the command center. In some ways, this is a return to a debate that already appeared to be settled. The NFL’s former approach was that broadcast directors would send selected replays to the center, but that changed ahead of the 2021 season, with Hawk-Eye technology giving the command center direct and instant access to every raw camera angle (well, up to 48, but that’s less than you’ll see in almost anything but a Super Bowl , and many of the extra ones for that aren’t particularly useful for replays). But the issue here comes from the key footage being enhanced rather than raw.
It’s clear that Prime Video’s production team was able to enhance this footage to a point where it was conclusive in a way that the raw footage was not. The questions are when they did that and what the procedures are for sending on enhanced footage, and/or what tools the command center has to enhance footage themselves.
(If the point of giving them instant access to the raw feeds is to make it so the directors aren’t a chokepoint in what they get, they should presumably be able to do some enhancements to those raw feeds themselves without relying on directors to do so.)
The problem here could come from any number of directions. Maybe the command center doesn’t have the right enhancement tools (which would be a giant issue and justify some of those “cheap” complaints), or maybe they do but didn’t use them the right way in this instance (which would be about people and skills rather than tech). Or maybe there is a requirement for networks to send on anything they enhance, and the issue was that the production team didn’t do that in a timely manner here. (This is also interesting with this happening on Prime, a network that has repeatedly talked up technology on their broadcasts, from their usage of Next Gen Stats to “ defensive alerts ” and more: it’s possible that if this had happened on another network, this footage wouldn’t have been enhanced this way, and this controversy wouldn’t have happened.)
We may never find out exactly what went wrong here. But this definitely wasn’t a good look for the broadcaster and/or the league (depending on your beliefs on who’s actually at fault). And it led to highly-unusual comments like the ones from 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan after the game , via Mark Maske of The Washington Post :
The 49ers challenged the play when Brian Hampton, their vice president of football administration, alerted Shanahan that it appeared the Seahawks had touched the ball, Shanahan said.
“It was awesome by [Hampton],” Shanahan said during his postgame news conference. “He said you could tell by how the guy’s hand moved that the ball hit him. That’s all he saw. He couldn’t 100 percent see the ball. But he said you could tell how the hand moved.”
The 49ers made the replay challenge, Shanahan said, hoping that there would be a camera shot to provide the necessary video evidence.
“With it being ‘Thursday Night Football,’ I thought for sure they’d have a bunch of camera angles,” Shanahan said. “So once he believed that it happened, we threw it, thinking we’d get some better angles. And then they just told me that he didn’t. And then about two minutes later, I heard all the guys in the box freaking out, saying they saw another angle and it was a fumble. … They [the officials] only know what they see. So they didn’t see, I think, what everyone else saw on TV.”
Regardless of what exactly led to it, it seems obvious there shouldn’t be a situation where the NFL’s command center “didn’t see what everyone else saw on TV.” We’ll see if and how the league addresses that going forward.
[ The Washington Post ]
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