Officiating has always been a contentious topic in the NFL. Just this week, the league has weighed in on using artificial intelligence to help officiating and mulled allowing replay officials to throw flags for certain infractions when they are missed. But perhaps the NFL should start by simply increasing the staff on its replay assist team.
Troy Vincent, the NFL's executive president of football operations, said on Monday that the league performed 171 replay reviews or replay assists during the 2025 season.
Vincent raised eyebrows around the NFL when he admitted that, on further review, the league got five of those decisions wrong. Of those five, four of them happened in the early window on Sundays.
Vincent claimed that the “volume” of games during the 1PM ET window was to blame for the mistakes.
Broncos head coach Sean Payton, who is on the NFL's competition committee, was not happy to hear that from Vincent.
“I don't like hearing that,” Payton said, per ESPN's Kalyn Kahler. “I want to play in the four o'clock window. I'm glad I'm in Denver. We should never have a work shortage in replay. Those are the things we'll try to clean up and correct, as far as people and just finding out.”
Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel suggested the league should add more staffing to prevent these issues. Vrabel is also on the competition committee.
“We need to evaluate staffing at that level,” Vrabel said on Wednesday. “To find out and make sure that every game is treated the same, whether it's the prime-time game on Sunday night or Monday or Thursday, or those one o'clock games that are the lifeblood of our league. If we need to figure out staffing issues that need to be taken care of so that those things are looked at and we're not letting anything slip.”
Vrabel explained that the league needs to get as close to 100% accuracy as possible on replay reviews.
“We need to be really good in replay. There's going to be mistakes on the field, just like there's mistakes in execution by the players, mistakes by the coaches,” Vrabel concluded. “There are going to be mistakes by the officials. There are, and they need to be decisive. They need to believe in what they're calling, but saying that, there's going to be mistakes. We have to get to a system in replay that is as close to 100% accurate as possible.”
Replay reviews and assists should be under a microscope when the 2026 NFL season kicks off this fall.
