After a largely unsuccessful one-year experiment, replay review of pass interference will not return to the NFL in 2020.
Competition Committee Chairman Rich McKay said on SiriusXM NFL Radio that the rule allowing the league office to use replay to review pass interference was passed for one year only, and there is so little support for passing it for another year this year, that no one is even going to bother bringing it to a vote.
“We’re not going to vote on, because nobody is putting forward, the OPI/DPI review again. So that dies a natural death,” McKay said.
McKay said the NFL tries to limit replay to objective questions like whether a ball touched the ground or whether a player’s foot touched a sideline, and that pass interference is fundamentally subjective.
“We were trying to apply something that we’ve always been fearful of . . . putting a totally subjective play into replay,” McKay said.
And with that, pass interference will now be determined exclusively by the officials on the field, with no review from the league officiating office.