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Holtz discusses proposed C-USA instant replay policy
By Nathan Summers, The Daily Reflector
Monday, June 13, 2005
Coaches always tell athletes to leave everything on the field.
At last month's Conference USA football coaches meetings, East Carolina's Skip Holtz got his feet wet by helping to tell C-USA football officials to leave it on the field, too.
The annual meetings, held this year in Irving, Texas, were consumed with discussion on how instant replay could or should be implemented to assist officials in making the right calls in the future. Using a recent model adopted by the Big East conference as a means for discussion, Holtz and C-USA's other skippers opted to go their own direction.
While the Big East would allow instant replays to be reviewed and ruled upon solely within the booth in the upper tiers of stadiums, C-USA coaches spoke in favor of leaving potentially game-saving decisions to be ultimately decided by the lead on-field referee.
The proposed system, according to Holtz, keeps games from being incorrectly determined by an official's flag and also keeps the final decision out of the hands of "the guy upstairs that nobody will ever see."
"We decided to go with more of an NFL policy," said Holtz, who replaced John Thompson as ECU coach last December. "The guy upstairs will review the plays, but they'll stop the game and the head official will come over and watch it on a monitor on the sidelines. The control will remain with the head guy on the field.
"There are no red flags, nothing like that. Coaches can't ask for a replay, that's all done upstairs."
Holtz, speaking specifically about a collegiate game he watched on tape from last year, called it a crime for 85 young men to spend a year seeking titles or bowl game wins that could be wrongly stripped from them by a missed or incorrect call.
Holtz said he didn't like the Big East notion of allowing the booth complete control. But Holtz, like most other college coaches, has yet to live and die with instant replay in real-game settings.
"I think it has a chance be a good system," he said. "I don't know the weaknesses of replay right now because I've never been involved with it. If it can eliminate one or two missed calls, then it's done the way it should be. And this way, it's done on the field."
Saying hello
Holtz said he didn't want to make too many waves in his first meeting with conference football coaches.
Instead of being vocal on issues relatively new to him, Holtz said he took the opportunity to get friendlier with the coaches he'll being going toe-to-toe against in a few months.
"I'm not going to go into Conference USA the first year, first meeting, having never played a game in this conference, and set a lot of policies," Holtz joked.
"I wanted to get a chance to be around Jeff Bower (Southern Miss) and Tommy West (Memphis) and guys like that. They're a lot of really good guys who care about this league that I think are good football coaches."
After making a return to head coaching after serving under father Lou Holtz at South Carolina, ECU's first-year coach said he was awestruck upon seeing all of C-USA's football bosses in front of him.
"You start looking around, and there's Mike Price, George O'Leary, Tommy West," Holtz said. "I look down that line and think, alright, Alabama, Notre Dame, Georgia Tech, Clemson – these guys are good football coaches."
Nathan Summers can be reached at (252)329-9595, or at nsummers@coxnews.com.
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