By Jenni Carlson
Staff Writer
The small booth in the south corner of the press box's seventh floor might be mistaken for a storage closet or a bathroom if not for the sign on the door.
INSTANT REPLAY.
DO NOT DISTURB.
On Saturday, though,
Oklahoma opened the door and the replay booth to members of the media. A week after Replaygate — officials failed to overturn two calls late in OU's 34-33 loss to Oregon that eventually led to the officiating team's suspension — the inner workings of instant replay were on display.
Monitors sit at each end of the 15-foot counter and are manned by technicians. A third monitor in the middle is used by the instant replay official, who spends 80 or 90 percent of his time focused on the screen. He sits by an assistant replay official whose primary responsibility is to watch the calls being made on the field.
"This is a business, quiet, controlled environment so that we can look at plays and determine if there's visual evidence that we should reverse a play," said
David Ames, the Big 12's officials observer who also works as an instant replay official. "We don't reverse that many, but we look at a lot."
Instant replay officials in the Big 12 usually have seven or more angles of each play. When games are not on television, the number of angles can shrink to as few as three.
The Big 12 also has a multi-layered backup system. In the back corner of the tiny booth is a mammoth console that holds a
TiVo, a DVD player and a VCR. All of them are recording the game feed so if the main system fails, the instant replay official can still see the television angles.
"I have never had to go to the back-up system,"
Ames said.
Last season was the first for instant replay in college football.
Ames worked eight games last season and will do another 11 this season.
"So I'm in the infancy of a career as an instant replay official,"
Ames said. "And I assume
Gordon Riese is, too."
Riese, of course, is the official who was in the instant replay booth a week ago at Oregon. He has become the target of angst from the Sooner Nation.
He has said that the pressure to be an instant replay official is worse than being on the field.
Ames knows what
Riese means.
Working for 26 seasons as an official in the Big Eight, then the Big 12,
Ames was on Owen Field that November evening in 2001 when
Oklahoma State knocked off the
Sooners and knocked them out of the national championship chase. He remembers the catch
Rashaun Woods made in the corner of the end zone, how close it was to the boundary, how much rode on the call.
"That's pressure," he said. "But that's the system that we've been in and we were confident. We knew we had that."
Instant replay feels different.
"This is fine,"
Ames said, "but it has an element that is pretty pressure-packed."
Ames has only about 20 or 30 seconds to decide if a play should be reviewed. If he thinks something is close enough to review, he must alert the on-field officials before the ball is snapped again. Many times he reviews plays and confirms them without ever stopping the action.
"Nobody ever knows I confirmed it," said
Ames, who looks a lot like former Kansas State coach
Bill Snyder with his thinning gray hair and his large wire-rimmed glasses. "We have coaches say, ‘Well, aren't they going to look at that?' Well, we have looked at it."
Ames takes his job as a replay official as seriously as he took it on the field.
"It's only as good as I am," he said, "and I'm less than perfect.
"I guess if there's anything that I feel comfortable with ... it's that guys are doing their best. They're not perfect, but they're doing their best."
