The replay booth clip is comically insufficient.

The replay booth clip is comically insufficient.
by rockmcd (2026-09-06 13:01:04)
Edited on 2026-09-06 13:52:12

In this clip that the Big10 released, after they determine that the ball wasn't intercepted because the WMU player was out of bounds, the picture of the clock just pops up into the feed seemingly out of nowhere. I'm not suggesting that they doctored it, but why does the clock with "0:01" only appear at the end of the play? Where was the ball when the clock was at 0:02, 0:03, etc? The problem is that every person watching this game on TV saw a clock run down 9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-0. If they want to persuade anyone, they need to present a video synchronized with a clock that runs down as 9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 starting at the snap. Let people run those side by side to see how the two clocks [Two clocks! I can't believe I'm typing that!] deviate from each other throughout the whole play. The only plausible explanation is that either the stadium clock started too early or the replay booth clock started too late. So which one one was it?

Based on this replay booth clip that the Big10 presented, the SEC Shorts script almost writes itself, as if the guy in the replay booth is saying "There's 1 second. Source: trust me bro."

The refs are like Joseph Smith.

“I am the only one who can see it, but trust me, it’s there.“

Dum dum dum dum dum dum *

Profits *

I believe Hawkeye was developed to determine position...

...and not to count time. It is used in tennis, for example, to determine of a ball is in or out--that's a positional issue that a high-frame-rate system like Hawkeye was designed to work on.

Hawkeye was not designed, I believe, to be a digital; timer the way the game clock is, where time is simply counted down sequentially. I read somewhere earlier that Hawkeye gets synced to the game clock and then interim timings of less than a second are based on frame rate algorithms. There is almost certainly a margin of error to this; Hawkeye admits to a 5% error margin (3.6mm versus the diameter of a tennis ball at 67mm) for in and out calls. Who knows what sort of error could creep into the attempt to use Hawkeye as a timer, rather than as a positional analyst.

The rule book says that the game clock keeps time, and tenths of a second aren't to be counted. So how did they manage to use an app designed to determine position to supercede the evidence of the game clock?

Answer

The sports books needed to see what the would make the most money on.