Sometimes instant replay can work and not work all at the same time.
WFAN's Boomer Esiason and Gregg Giannotti felt that was the case during Monday night's national championship game between Virginia and Texas Tech.
With a little more than a minute left in overtime and Virginia leading by two, the Cavaliers' De’Andre Hunter appeared to knock the ball out of Texas Tech guard Davide Moretti's hand and out of bounds. In real time, few, if any, people would have questioned the call.
"At the end of the day, this is the thing that's going to ruin this game. It's going to be this stupid replay. They're going to overturn a play where a kid's pinky has hit the ball -- and I guess if you really want to be hard core about it, OK, it went off of him, according to the officials. But I don't know, it's just one of those plays where I just felt like it took the entire kind of excitment out of the game."
Said Giannotti: "You know what this reminded me of? It reminded me of in baseball when a guy will slide into a bag and then like his foot will come off for like a milli-inch and the glove's on it, and he's called out. And you're thinking, well, this isn't what replay is for, the guy is clearly safe, and now we're just basically splitting hairs. It's like a forensic team comes in and decides it."
But Gio added that if replay is going to be a part of the rules, the refs had no choice but to rule the way they did Monday night.
"You can only judge what you see and come back with that call," he said. "And that's what they saw."
To listen to the open from Tuesday's "Boomer and Gio," in which the guys go into greater detail about the national championship game and also react to the news that Chris Mullin is planning to step down as St. John's coach, click on the audio player above.