Who would have thought a microwave could have shut down the NFL replay operations center for a couple of minutes. Dean Blandino was the former head of officiating for the NFL and on a recent “Mike Delivers” podcast he retold a story about a time the NFL replay center crashed.
On Thanksgiving Day in 2016, the gameday operations crew brought in Thanksgiving food to eat. During the Detroit Lions and Minnesota Vikings game, someone wanted to heat up some food in a microwave. They plugged that oven into the same circuit that the replay center was on, which caused it go down.
“We took the microwave, plugged it in, but they plugged it into the same outlet, the same circuit that the replay system was plugged into, and when they turned the microwave on, the whole thing went down. So we were down for maybe like two minutes while they fixed it. The game was going on, but thankfully we didn’t have any replay reviews, but we kind of shut down the system because we wanted to heat up the stuffing for Thanksgiving in the microwave.”
All the NFL would have needed during that time was for the replay center to be needed and the game to be delayed on national television. It's funny story now, but if the replay center would have been down and needed there would have been a couple of people being yelled at. All someone wanted was some warm stuffing on Thanksgiving, but serving that almost delayed a football game.
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