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By Andrew Gould
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SEC officiating is under a bright microscope after a controversial Saturday. Commissioner Greg Sankey redirected the blame from replay reviews to broadcasting booths.
Unlike other power conferences, the SEC does not offer a live look-in with audio. Missouri athletic director Laird Veatch wrote an open letter advocating for more replay transparency after some questionable calls hurt the Tigers in Saturday's 34-20 loss to Texas.
Sankey defended SEC officials on Monday's "The Paul Finebaum Show," insisting they do "really good work." He explained the challenges of offering more replay access with all of the conference's games occurring on Saturday and noted that the SEC replay room has "multiple voices" when broadcast feeds for other conference look-ins prominently feature one voice.
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“I don’t think we have the luxury of like designating one game on a Saturday where that access would be provided, and our room wasn’t set up for full audio access,” Sankey said. “So how do we work through providing broad access? We actually became the first to show video access to every replay that’s being considered this year. We offered it before, so you can see the video in real-time that’s being provided."
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Sankey then turned the tables on broadcasters for misleading viewers with inaccurate call assessments and uninformed criticism of the SEC's replay process. He appeared to call out Matt Schumacker and Aaron Murray for discussing controversial calls from the afternoon's Missouri-Texas matchup while working Oklahoma vs. Florida for the SEC Network.
"Now I’ll say this: I am highly disappointed in announcers and their criticism,” Sankey said. "And they're wrong. Some of the worst officials in America are those in the announce booth. We have officiating experts, who I turned on a game on Saturday, who was just flat wrong. And what that creates is this narrative that we’ve done something wrong, and that is unacceptable to me, and we have to address that.
"We're going to be wrong. We’ve made announcements when we own it. We’re going to have debates about judgment calls. But somebody on a Saturday night who’s announcing a game between Oklahoma and Florida going back to something that happened at noon, that he’s never called and asked a question about, and being critical is unacceptable in my mind."
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