Troy Vincent Says Pass Interference Replay “Failed Miserably” and Takes the Blame, but Also Misses the Point a Little

ESPN – NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent, in an interview with NBC Sports, acknowledged that the league “failed miserably” in its implementation of pass interference replay reviews last season and that such failure would serve as a cautionary tale for the NFL to not rush rule changes in the future.

Vincent’s comments came during a broader discussion of the “sky judge” proposal, the addition of a booth umpire to each officiating crew, a modified version of which is set to be voted on during Thursday’s NFL owners videoconference meeting.

“We cannot fail this year,” Vincent told NBC Sports. “We saw, a year ago, when [the pass interference rule] played out, starting with myself, what we put in place last year … Those outcomes were not good for professional football. Because we didn’t do the proper due diligence, it played out publicly. The last thing people should be talking about is the way the game is officiated. They [officials] should be faceless objects, managing and facilitating game flow.

“We failed. I’m first in line. I shared that [with league officials]. I failed as the leader of that department. I failed. 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,” he added.

While I commend Vincent for wearing the hat and placing blame on himself and the league for the complete catastrophe that was pass interference replay, there seems to be a significant thing he is missing in his analysis of why the system failed so spectacularly. Vincent makes it seem like the league was ill-prepared for the system and that it put officials in a bad position. But that’s simply not the totality of what people’s major issues were with it.

Yes, a part of the problem is that pass interference is so split-second that slowing down these plays could make everything look like pass interference. And yes, they could have provided more guidelines to the public about how they would approach such replays. And yes, they could have made sure that there was a blanket system for what constituted pass interference that all officials understood as uniformly as possible. Plus it may have been nice if officials had not suddenly called offensive pass interference on players standing still as defenders ran into them a little bit. All of those issues can be viewed as consequences of unpreparedness.

But from what I saw from viewers on a day-in, day-out basis last season was not pissed-offedness directed at the refs’ lack of cohesion as much as it was directed at Al Riveron, and therefore the officials’, apparent egomania. There were remarkably few overturns, especially early in the season, and the non-overturns often came to the point of parity. NOTHING got overturned, and then Riveron would go on Twitter and bend over backwards to make his officials seem right when it was pretty doggone clear that Riveron had instructed them to lean “call stands” if there was any semblance of a doubt.

It was an obvious joke all season — this would not have been overturned.

January 20, 2019: Drew Brees pass intended for Tommylee Lewis sails incomplete. Nickell Robey-Coleman on the coverage. No flag. #LARvsNO #NFCChampionship pic.twitter.com/AvzGcpGm2h

— Bad Sports Refs (@BadSportsRefs) January 20, 2020

And then when they started overturning some calls, they were usually ticky-tacky at best. They would overturn non-calls for the weakest hand-fighting, etc., fully aware that the NFL fans would complain about the system and the refs — who never wanted the system in the first place — could raise their middle fingers and say “See? This was a stupid idea all along!”

Vincent may be correct in saying the NFL was unprepared and that’s why the system failed. But the reality is clear: officials had no interest in being prepared and that’s why the system failed as horrifically as it did.

Al Riveron on turning over Pass Interference pic.twitter.com/B1pK6YfRVH

— Tone Digs (@ToneDigz) November 17, 2019