Technology in Sports Raises Issues of Fairness
It seems like just yesterday sports resisted every attempt to introduce technology into their games. Traditionalists decry the removal of the human element. Modernists present technology as a matter of fairness – in that we could finally correct unjust wrong calls. A couple of decades into this “technological revolution”, its hard to say our games are any more fair today than they were before our cameras, replays, and super slo-mos found their way into the rules books of sport.
Both teams receive six timeouts at the start of a college basketball game, unless the basketball game just so happens to be close late, and the officials watch the game clock with hawkish eyes. Going to the monitor in late game situations ground to contest to a halt. In more than a few instances, teams without timeouts find themselves able to gather around the coach and work out a last-second adjustment or play. So much for placing a premium on timeouts. Just keep the game close and the officials will parade over to the scorers table to keep an eye on those precious tenths of a second. The delay will last longer than a timeout so you’ll have plenty of time to adjust your defense or set up a last-second scoring play. What’s the point of preserving your timeouts if your opponents waste them early? Sure, you might not get that fortunate clock review when you most need it, but too often in this recent NCAA Tournament the officials huddled around a monitor while teams regrouped and called plays in close games.
And when does the statute of limitations end on video replays? Take Tiger Woods at the Masters this weekend. For a brief moment the real possibility that Woods, one stroke off the lead, would be disqualified for turning in an incorrect scorecard after taking a questionable drop after hitting into the water on the 15th hole. It would later be determined, well after the round via video replay, that Woods took his drop too far from his original divot. The ruling was a two-stroke penalty. But it seems the rule is being enforced through video replay after the fact. If the rules official with the group missed the illegal drop, how far back do we look? And if the mistake is not corrected prior to submitting one’s scorecard, could the round then be deemed over? It seems we could infinetely replay into perpetuity any shot or scenario via video, seeking even the slightest of rules violations.
Baseball has been very slow to adopt technological advances. But in an incident Tampa Bay Rays manager John Madden simply referred to as “something that should not happen in a Major League game” went uncorrected. Joe Nathan’s final pitch clearly missed the plate by a good six inches, but yet, homeplate umpire Marty Foster called strike three and snuffed a late Rays rally. In this case a clearly unfair outcome occurred because the technology that could precisely review the call – PitchFX – is used for umpire evaluation and not for in-game reviews of questionable calls.
Another slow adopter, FIFA, has resisted goal line review technology for almost as long as television cameras have been bringing the world’s most popular games to living rooms across the globe. Next season, the Premier League will be implementing goal line technology in the English game with much consternation from those associated the game. Truth is, it’ll have minimal impact – the number of goals impacted will be counted on one hand. Proponents claim they’re modernizing the game. Opponents say the referree as authority on the pitch has been undermined. Given the allegations of match fixing in Europe, not sure fairness is possible.
No matter the case, technology seems to have simply moved the attention away from the human element and into a realm where we’re reviewing the fairness of the technology or the process. Perhaps this can be considered an improvement.