On Monday at the NFL scouting combine, Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations, said that out of the 171 replay review or replay assist decisions that happened in the 2025 NFL season, there were five that the NFL wanted back.
Of those five, four took place in 1 p.m. E.T. games, because of the “volume” of games, Vincent said.
​​”There were five after we kind of took a step back and breathed — four of them [were] in the 1 o’clock window,” Vincent said. “Just volume and you go, ‘Ah, if we had to do that one again,’ just looking at it.”
Denver Broncos head coach Sean Payton, who is a member of the NFL’s competition committee, said this week he was “a little surprised” to find out that the majority of replay errors happened in 1 p.m. games.
“I don’t like hearing that,” said Payton. “I want to play in the four o’clock window. I’m glad I’m in Denver. We should never have a work shortage in replay. Those are the things we’ll try to clean up and correct, as far as people and just finding out.”
New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel, another member of the competition committee, also questioned whether staffing was the root of the issue in the league’s replay headquarters.
“We need to evaluate staffing at that level,” Vrabel said Wednesday. “To find out and make sure that every game is treated the same, whether it’s the prime-time game on Sunday night or Monday or Thursday, or those 1 o’clock games that are the lifeblood of our league. If we need to figure out staffing issues that need to be taken care of so that those things are looked at and we’re not letting anything slip.”
Each game at the 1 p.m. hour has a replay assistant dedicated to monitoring the action from the league replay center at the New York league office. The replay assistants have an individual station and use an Xbox controller to view the different camera angles from the game. But the replay assistant is not the final decision-maker on a review. There are replay supervisors and vice presidents in the officiating department that can make the final decision on reviews, and with the expansion of replay assist, 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 the replay decisions, because the league has been vague about specifying who makes each individual replay decision.
Rule 15 in the NFL rulebook says the “senior VP of officiating or his or her 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 clarity 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].”
San Francisco 49ers general manager John Lynch, also a competition committee member, said this week that he thinks the cause of the problem is that the 1 p.m. games are set up with fewer broadcast cameras. He said there have been discussions about requiring teams to have fixed cameras in stadium to ensure uniformity in camera angles across games.
“I lived in the broadcasting world for nine years,” Lynch said. “I know that when I was on the seventh team at Fox, I dealt with a lot less cameras and the type of angles to when I worked my way up to the second team at Fox. Now the motherload is when you’re doing Sunday night. Cris Collinsworth and Mike Tirico, they’re basically doing a Super Bowl in terms of the amount of angles. I do think that’s something we want to strive for as a league. That is a reality, that the one o’clock games, there’s multiple games going on at the same time, so the New York headquarters, they’re not going to have all their attention on that game,” Lynch said. “Just not having the amount of cameras and angles, and that’s a reality and something that we have to figure out, because every game is important in our league, not just the prime-time games.”
Vrabel added Wednesday: “We need to be really good in replay. There’s going to be mistakes on the field, just like there’s mistakes in execution by the players, mistakes by the coaches. There are going to be mistakes by the officials. There are, and they need to be decisive. They need to believe in what they’re calling, but saying that, there’s going to be mistakes. We have to get to a system in replay that is as close to 100% accurate as possible.”
The collective bargaining agreement for NFL officials and the NFL expires in May, and the two parties have not yet reached a new agreement.
