I was watching the World Series of Poker when they had to stop the action and look at the replay. After sixteen minutes and twenty-nine different angles an official announces, “The ruling on the table stands, the bald guy who keeps picking up and dropping his chips has a pair!”

Turns out I had dozed off and was dreaming that poker had become the NFL.

I can’t take it anymore. The NFL and the NCAA for that matter have stepped onto the slippery slope of instant replay and are now free falling into a bottomless pit of reviews and delays and controversy and nuanced rules interpretations from which it can never escape. It hurts the game, interrupts nearly every possession, and the genie can never be shoved back into the bottle. It’s gotten so hideously complicated that the league has had to hire rules experts who pop up on the corner of your TV screen after almost every play to provide some sort of complex definition of a rulebook statute. They’re like cheapass NFL lawyers and they get more airtime than the Bud Light Dilly-Dilly guys (in 2018 I’m trying to work Dilly-Dilly into every post I possibly can).

If it takes an expert to interpret the rules, if it takes a ten-minute point-counterpoint between the prosecution and the defense, then the entire matter has jumped the shark. The rules are too complicated, too nuanced. Most of the time these intrusive replay reviews end up with “there is not enough visual evidence to overturn the call” which is just a stupid way of saying that the play should not have been reviewed in the first place.

At this point, I would really, really be satisfied with close enough. I don’t need irrefutable evidence about anything, certainly not about a play in a football game. I’m okay with just getting most of the calls right and getting on with the fuckin’ game. If a guy has the ball for a count of “one Mississippi” then he has possession, if he gets within the general area of the end zone, give him a touchdown. Shit, no one knows what the rules are anymore anyway so let’s just simply.

Of course, simplification won’t happen, can’t happen, because we live in a world where there can never be less technology … there always has to be more technology. No, now that instant replay is the focal point of every game, the essence of the TV experience, the one way we can be sure that life never comes down to human instincts and judgment, we can never go back.

What will happen now is that lasers will be installed along the sidelines, circuit boards will be installed helmets, GPS sensors will track the flight of the ball, first downs will be determined by satellite-based calculations of the earth’s longitude and latitude. And at that point, football will cease to be the game we once played as lads, it’ll be a science experiment, an algorithm, an activity totally controlled by pinheads at mission control.

I did so love football.