NFL Replay Errors: What’s Going On?
During the NFL Scouting Combine, Troy Vincent, the league’s executive vice president of football operations, revealed a concerning piece of information. Of the 171 decisions reviewed or assisted by replay during the 2025 season, the NFL would have preferred to have made a different decision in five of them. The most striking thing is that four of those errors occurred in the 1 p.m. ET games, due to the “volume” of games, according to Vincent.Denver Broncos head coach Sean Payton, a member of the NFL’s competition committee, expressed his surprise upon learning that the majority of replay errors occurred in the 1 p.m. games.“There were five after we stepped back and took a breath, four of them in the one o’clock window,” Vincent said. “Just the volume and you say, ‘Ah, if we had to do that again,’ just looking at it.”
Troy Vincent, NFL executive vice president of football operations
Mike Vrabel, New England Patriots head coach and also a member of the competition committee, questioned whether staffing was the root of the problem in the league’s replay headquarters.“I don’t like hearing that,” Payton said. “I want to play in the four o’clock window. I’m glad to be in Denver. We should never have a shortage of work on the replay. Those are the things we’ll try to clean up and correct, as far as the people and just figuring it out.”
Sean Payton, Denver Broncos head coach
Each game at the 1 p.m. hour features a replay assistant dedicated to monitoring the action from the league’s replay center at the league office in New York. Replay assistants have an individual station and use an Xbox controller to view the different camera angles of the game. However, the replay assistant is not the one who makes the final decision on a review. There are replay supervisors and vice presidents in the officiating department who can make the final decision on reviews, and with the expansion of replay assistance, those who work in game management for NFL clubs have wondered exactly who that final decision-maker is, and how many people within the officiating department have the power to make replay decisions, because the league has been vague in specifying who makes each individual replay decision. Rule 15 in the NFL rulebook states that the “senior vice president of officiating or his designee” is the person who can initiate a review of a play, conduct a review, change the ruling of a play, or disqualify a player. In October, when asked for clarification on that, NFL vice president of replay training and development, Mark Butterworth, said that “the decision is made in the AMGC [Art McNally GameDay Central]”. John Lynch, general manager of the San Francisco 49ers and also a member of the competition committee, believes the cause of the problem is that the 1 p.m. games are set up with fewer broadcast cameras. There have been discussions about the need for teams to have fixed cameras in the stadium to ensure uniformity in camera angles in all games.“We need to evaluate the staffing at that level,” Vrabel said on Wednesday. “To figure out and make sure that every game is treated the same way, whether it’s the Sunday night prime-time game or Monday or Thursday, or those one o’clock games that are the lifeblood of our league. If we need to solve staffing issues that need to be addressed so that those things are analyzed and we’re not letting anything slip by us.”
Mike Vrabel, New England Patriots head coach
Vrabel added on Wednesday: “We need to be really good at the replay. There will be mistakes on the field, just as there are mistakes in execution by the players, mistakes by the coaches. There will be mistakes by the referees. There are, and they must be decisive. They need to believe in what they are calling, but that said, there will be mistakes. We have to get to a replay system that is as accurate as possible.” The collective bargaining agreement for NFL officials and the NFL expires in May, and the two sides have yet to reach a new agreement.“I lived in the broadcasting world for nine years,” Lynch said. “I know that when I was on Fox’s seventh team, I was dealing with far fewer cameras and the kind of angles than when I moved up to Fox’s second team. Now, the mother of all loads is when you’re doing Sunday night. Cris Collinsworth and Mike Tirico, they’re basically doing a Super Bowl in terms of the number of angles. I think that’s something we want to strive for as a league. That’s the reality, that the one o’clock games, there are multiple games going on at the same time, so the New York headquarters isn’t going to have all its attention on that game,” Lynch said. “Just not having the number of cameras and angles, and that’s a reality and something we have to solve, because every game is important in our league, not just the prime-time games.”
John Lynch, general manager of the San Francisco 49ers
