Severian talks about the surprising statistical results when the NFL introduced “instant replay”:
I was a big NFL fan when they first started debating the now-standard “instant replay challenge” rules. Like most people, I was all for it — geez, these refs are terrible, video’s the way to go. My only worry was that if every call those numbnuts obviously screwed up got reviewed, games would last 12 hours …
But a funny thing happened: As with most people, my respect for the refs went way, way up once they put in the video challenge rules. Yeah, they screw up one or two calls per game, the challenges prove that … but that’s one or two out of hundreds, which is a phenomenal success rate. Not only that, even the very toughest calls — the ones that draw the red flags — they get right, or at least not-wrong (football is nothing if not Hegelian), about half the time. Put it through all the techno-whizbangery you want — slow it down to molasses-in-winter speed, run it through one of those Blade Runner image enhancers — and it’s still pretty much a coin toss, at least half the time. And the refs are making those calls at full speed, from dramatically different angles.
In other words, I learned a lesson in applied statistics. Before instant replay, if you’d asked me to guess, as objectively as possible, how many calls per game the refs blew, I’d have said something like “four or five, tops”. (I suppose we must pause here to note, for the benefit of anyone who still follows the NFL for some reason, that I’m not talking about bullshit like the “tuck rule” or whatever the fuck a “catch” is supposed to be these days, which even the refs don’t seem to understand; I’m talking stuff like “Did he fumble?” or “They missed the ball spot by a yard or two”). I certainly wouldn’t go any higher than that, and if you told me that an independent auditing firm had reviewed ten seasons’ worth of game tape and came up with a hard number of 2.6 calls per game, I’d roll with it, no problem.
If you then told me that this represents a “failure rate” of well under 1%, well, I’m not sure I want to go through all the math to check you, but I’d believe it, because I know something about how the game is played. I don’t want to get too far off track here, but for the benefit of casual fans and especially non-American readers, there are 11 men on a football team, and all of them have the opportunity to do all kinds of illegal stuff on every single play. Call it 65 plays per game (the first rough number I could find with a five second internet search), and that’s … well, my math doesn’t go that high, but let’s just say it’s a lot of opportunities for fouls. And that’s not counting all the other stuff refs have to do — that they have the opportunity to get wrong — on nearly every play: Marking the ball spot, determining where a guy went out of bounds, and so on.
The important thing to note is how far my emotional perceptions of the game diverge from statistical reality. Let’s stipulate that all the math up there results in a “success rate” of 99.993%. I’d buy that … Intellectually I’d buy it, because I know a bit about how math works, and a lot more about how football works, but note my first impression when they started talking about instant replay: “Oh God yes, these guys suck, they blow so many calls that games are going to last 12 hours if they review all the calls those lousy refs obviously miss.”
Emotion beats math, every time.
And note that I’m talking about refs in general here. In general, they blow calls all the time (the emotional me said), but when it comes to my team in particular, well, they’ve obviously got it out for us. They screw up an entire season’s worth of calls every time my team plays, and all those screwups go the opponents’ way!
I’m kidding, but I’m not joking. I got to see this process firsthand, and that’s the second lesson instant replay taught me: “Indisputable video evidence,” as the phrase is, don’t mean squat when you’ve got your heart and soul in it.
Every NFL fan knows that the refs hate their particular team and love their most hated rival, and no amount of indisputable evidence will shake that belief. NFL fans are rather like progressives in that way …
