ROSEMONT, Ill. — Looking around the rows of video monitors and hearing officials talk about “CROs” using a “Hawk-Eye” system, you might think you’ve walked into a military control room.
But the only long bombs observed are football-type bombs.
CRO is Big Ten acronym for “Collaborative Replay Official,” and Hawk-Eye is the software they will use this season to review plays on the football field. It’s all part of the high-tech upgrades conference officials showed off Tuesday at the Big Ten’s new, state-of-the-art replay center at their headquarters in Rosemont.
“This is really the marriage of great people and great technology,” said Commissioner Tony Petitti. “It still comes down to people having to make decisions, sometimes very difficult, very close decisions. And our job in this replay center is to provide the technology, the speed, the look and the ability to make great decisions as quickly as possible.”
College sports have caught up with professional leagues in the replay systems they use, and the Big Ten wanted to branch out on its own from the Pittsburgh-based DVSport replay center it shared with other NCAA conferences.
Construction began in January and the conference spent an undisclosed sum to convert its former Big Ten Experience museum into a 2,000-square-foot control room with 18 playback stations, touchscreen monitors, Xbox controllers, soundproof walls and other fancy amenities.
“When you talk about an arms race, technology is constantly improving,” Petitti said. “I come from MLB. During my tenure there, we built a brand new replay center. And just the technology is changing. … The ability to use those improvements to make things faster, more engaging, faster, better — that puts a lot of pressure on the people in that room to get it right.”
“There’s a lot at stake in these games, and a lot of these replays happen in many cases at the most critical moment of a game. So it’s really important to me to give them the technology they need and train them properly so they can make those decisions in real time and feel good about it.”
AJ Edds, vice president of football administration and former Iowa linebacker, said the new system has several advantages over the Pittsburgh conference.
“The video boards, these video walls are bigger, more dynamic, more versatile, so we can see more (angles) in one snapshot,” he said. “The internet connection is unmatched. It’s virtually latency-free. It’s real-time.”
When a questionable play comes up for review, a CRO alerts one of the four replay center supervisors by turning on a red tally light at his station.
An audio facility allows for a four-way conversation between the referee on the field, the replay instructor, the CRO and the supervisor. The supervisor makes the final decision from the replay center.
Bill Carollo, soccer referee coordinator, selects the replay center staff, most of whom work part-time. Some former referees and other field umpires have been hired to work at the center, but contrary to popular belief, they are not always the best replay reviewers, Carollo said.
“We’re looking for more analytical, process-oriented (people): engineers, lawyers,” he said. “For example, we hire a lot of lawyers who work in replay, and sometimes they’ve never worked on the field. Dean Blandino has never worked on the field, is perhaps the best replay resource in the country, in the world, in that regard.
“So it’s a different skill set than the guys on the field and a different way of thinking. So we test their ability for repetition. We test their ability on the field, their aptitude, their cognitive ability and so on. And the bar is pretty high for repetition players.”
Edds gave a hypothetical example of how the system could work, from the referee on the field to the supervisor at the replay center.
“Let’s say a ball carrier reaches for the goal line and his knee might have been down before he got to the goal line,” Edds said. “On the field, they might have called it just before the line or just before the end zone.”
“But the play is reviewed and we can use all the angles available. It could be from this line, from that line, an angle from behind – maybe there’s a Skycam angle that helps – and we can stitch all that together so it’s synchronized. So when they go through frame by frame on the Xbox controller, each of those cameras will show up as it advances for the frame. So they can work out exactly where the ball was when the knee went down.
“And if the ball had broken the plane, we would have said, ‘That was a touchdown.’ … (But) if they had said, ‘Oh, that’s confirmed, he was actually close to the end zone with the ball when his knee went down,’ we would have communicated that to the field.”
The referee would make the announcement in the stadium and for the television audience.
“He confirms the result he heard and then the game continues,” Edds said.
____
