The Broun Blog

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- The Southeastern Conference will use instant replay on an experimental basis during league games for the 2005 season.

University presidents and chancellors approved the change on Thursday, a day after athletic directors voted for it.

"Through every meeting and discussion with our coaches, athletic directors and presidents and chancellors, the use of instant replay received overwhelming support," SEC commissioner Mike Slive said. "Our officials make every effort to get each call right. Instant replay will go a long way in helping them accomplish their goal."

Details of the league's instant replay plan will be decided at the SEC spring meetings, held May 31-June 3 in Destin, Fla.

The NCAA Football Rules Committee recommended in February that member conferences and schools be allowed to experiment with instant replay for the 2005 season, as the Big Ten did last year.

Slive indicated earlier that he expected the SEC to use a system similar to the Big Ten, with officials in a booth determining which plays to review, not officials or coaches on the field.

The Big Ten said replay was used in 28 of the 57 games last season. Of the 43 calls questioned, 21 were overturned.

However, the system would not necessarily have altered the SEC's most publicized officiating mistakes last season -- a clock-management gaffe in the Florida-Tennessee game and an apparent pass interference that wasn't called in the end zone during the Alabama-LSU game. Link

I bet the last sentence got a nice reaction from Bama fans. Bwa-ha-ha! What are your thoughts on instant replay? Personally, I don't see how it will be any more disruptive to "the pace of the game" than the constant TV timeouts at every significant SEC game.

A quick heads-up, I noticed that Yahoo turns ten years old today. To celebrate, Yahoo is offering a free scoop of Baskin-Robbins ice cream to all registered users, today only.

I'm not sure the next decade will be as successful for Yahoo as the last: Google has become the search engine for the world wide web, and its Gmail service is impressive. In my opinion, Yahoo still has better directories, Yellow Pages service, map service, and pages devoted to movies and music; but a decade is a lifetime for the computer industry.

(Actually, about 7 lifetimes, if you use Moore's Law as a standard.)

So, here's to Yahoo, to reminiscing about the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium, and to getting free ice cream.