Instant replay and a fine, please?

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Dan Rosen

Not too hard to figure out, or is it?

Maybe Phil Luckett, the official of the Steelers-Lions game on Turkey Day needs a hearing aid, or maybe he just doesn't like to listen to somebody in a crucial situation, but the question still remains in every football fan's mind: WHAT THE HELL?

This was not a mistake that your everyday Joe can make. Even I heard Jerome Bettis say "tails" and I was sitting on my couch thousands of miles away.

But, unfortunately, there is nothing we can do now except sit, wonder and whine about the infamous coin toss.

We may not be able to do anything about Luckett's hearing, but we can do something about the horrible officiating that goes on every week in the NFL.

League officials simply have to implement the instant replay and, for God's sake, leave absolutely no room for human error.

No, I am not saying we should have instant replay on coin tosses because that happens just about as often as Trung Canidate and Yusuf Scott fail to make me laugh, but the NFL officiating has proven that instant replay is necessary and crucial.

So, how do we go about putting it in and still saving time for all those precious TV station identification messages?

1. True football fans will watch a game even if it is 10 minutes longer due to instant replay.

2. Why not give each team two chances to use the replay throughout the whole game and if they want to use it more than that, take a timeout away from them for each use of the replay?

3. Instead of going to television timeouts in the middle of a quarter or after a score, use the TV timeout at the time the instant replay is going on.

4. The officiating sucks as it is, so numbers one, two and three make more sense than what we have now.

And, maybe, just maybe, if the NFL were to reach its giant claws into the officials' pockets and take some money away from them for horrible calls, the refs may pay a little more attention.

If a player does something bad on the field he is benched, and if it is deliberate he is fined by the league. If an official makes a bad call he gets a slap on the wrist and someone telling him to not let it happen again.

Woooooooo, scary. Stop, you don't want to threaten them too much.

Please, when my bosses say something like that to me I laugh in their faces because I don't believe them, but if they threaten my paycheck I become a little more aware.

So, I ask the NFL for two things: One, instant replay, and two, punishment for the idiots in the zebra shirts.

Calls that change the outcome of a game like the coin toss, or for that matter every call in that game or the pass interference in the Patriots-Bills game, can't keep happening.

It is not the officials' jobs to decide who comes out victorious, so do not let them have that power. Leave it up to the guys who have devoted their entire lives to playing football and entertaining the fans.

Dan Rosen is a junior majoring in journalism, and he is holding his excitement back until the final whistle is blown by yes, an official, in the UCLA-Miami game.