Two Fridays ago, the University of Pennsylvania was the beneficiary of a red card issued to Princeton defensive midfielder Samantha DeVito. The decision was originally a yellow card for a cross-check to a Penn attacker, but after a few seconds, the umpire signaled the sending off of the Princeton player.
The angle of the check was, if you oriented the Quaker player towards the goal, at about 8 o’clock. It wasn’t a particularly egregious foul but it did stop an attack. In other sports, these kinds of fouls are sanctioned with a bit more severity. In soccer, it would have been a professional foul, punishable by a yellow card. In pro basketball, it is now called a take foul, punishable with free throws and possession. In field hockey, it’s a breakdown foul and is cardable, if not punishable by a penalty stroke depending on the circumstances.
A week later, in Florida’s win over North Carolina, a clip shared widely on social media shows a UNC player, in trying to escape close marking, swing her stick and hitting her defender in the torso while the ball was going around the perimeter. The UNC player was not carded.
Sport is in an era of second-guessing and re-refereeing, where, on occasion, people in a room in front of video screens are making crucial decisions which determine the outcome of a game. The thing is, the game officials — the people actually on the pitch watching over the action — know this.
I remember a story in which an NFL official was making a close call of some kind, but as he was marking the spot of the ball, he said to one of his colleagues, “That’s going upstairs.”
The original “eye in the sky” system, where any play could be reviewed upstairs, resulted in an average of 12.6 percent of reviewed calls overturned. The number was slightly more than two per game between 1986 and 1991.
Currently, the NCAA does not have video replay in women’s lacrosse. It was only allowed beginning last year, and only for conference play. It also would not have been implemented in either of the two scenarios delineated above.
One would hope that, in future, a video official might be able to help the on-field umpires in these kinds of situations to make decisions more consistent across the ever-changing landscape of women’s lacrosse.