NFL

Everyone hates officials. Wrong calls get made. No Calls happen all the time. And inconsistent officiating in a game can give the appearance of bias. What if instead of making every play reviewable for currently non-reviewable plays, teams could appeal to new york and get awarded penalty negations.

Essentially creating a system where if one team is getting away with penalties the other team starts getting awarded the ability to force a penalty to be declined.

Each team could have dedicated personnel reviewing plays during a game and submitting them to new york during a game. If new york agrees you get a penalty negating flag that a coach can throw to automatically overturn a penalty.

You might have to cap the number at say 2 penalty negations to avoid incentivizing plays that could lead to injury. Like if one team had like 6 penalty negations in their back pocket you would just rough the passer a ton on a drive and still have some left over. Just 2 would incentivizing saving them for important situations.

This could do a few things:

• reduce the appearance of biased officiating. If the officials on the field are missing calls against one team well the other team gets rewarded for it.

• reduce dubious penalties that cost teams in big spots. Nothing feels worse than feeling like a bad call, no call, or iffy call (like when a penalty isn’t getting called all game then suddenly gets called in the last few minutes of a close game) costs a team a win.

• disincentivize flopping.

• incentivize excessive celebration and taunting in blow outs, which are fun.

I think this would be in addition to the existing review system.

I also think maybe you limit the number of plays a team can appeal a lot of penalties occur in a gray area and don’t get called on most plays. So teams should only get a handful of plays to appeal. So that only really bad officiating mistakes earn a negation. An example might be the no call on an obvious face mask penalty.