"The hope is that the egregious, momentum-changing errors will be eliminated from the game," said Ken Rivera, the league's supervisor of football officials. "It's a fresh breath of air into officiating at the college football level. . . . It makes things right if you make a mistake, and it can only make things better."
The league has not determined exactly how the system will work, but said Wednesday that it has created a subcommittee that includes senior associate athletic director Tom Holmoe of Brigham Young to do that. Rivera said he expects the system to closely resemble the Big Ten model, which primarily allowed reviews of close plays on the sidelines or goal line and those in which possession on pass receptions and fumbles was in question.
"It's an exciting deal," he said.
Coaches seem to think so, too.
Brigham Young's Bronco Mendenhall endorsed the plan after hearing about it Wednesday, though he's interested to learn the details. Utah's Kyle Whittingham could not be reached for comment.
The NCAA will establish the list of reviewable plays, but the league must decide on other features, like whether the replay official will work from the field or the press box, whether coaches will be allowed to "challenge" calls on the field (Rivera doubts that will happen right away) and what kind of equipment and personnel will be used.
The subcommittee will present its ideas - as well as a projected budget - to the league's athletic directors and board of directors, who must submit a plan to the NCAA Football Rules Committee for approval by June 1.
The NCAA is expected to formally approve replay for all leagues at a meeting next week, after the rules committee recommended it earlier this month for all of major college football.
The Big Ten used its experimental replay system in all 44 conference games and 13 nonconference home games last season, and found that it lengthened game times from 3 hours and 13 minutes in 2003 to 3 hours and 16 minutes last season.
The league stopped play to review calls 43 times in 28 games, and 21 of those calls were overturned. It said its average length of a review was 2 minutes and 43 seconds, shorter than the average of 3:20 in the NFL.
Rivera said "a couple of plays" would have been overturned in the Mountain West last season, had a replay system been in place.
In addition to Rivera, coaches Tom Craft of San Diego State and Fisher DeBerry of Air Force will join associate conference commissioners Jim Andrus and Bret Gilliland, Holmoe and athletic director Eric Hyman of Texas Christian on the subcommittee that will decide the details of the Mountain West replay system.
mcl@sltrib.com
