Video review is now part of every major American sport, and complaints about it are constant. Most disputes trace to two design choices each league made independently.
Who starts a review is a design choice
Some leagues give coaches a limited number of challenges, spending a timeout or forfeiting the challenge when wrong. Others route reviews through officials or a central booth.
Challenge systems put strategy into officiating, since a coach must decide whether a call is worth a finite resource at that moment in the game.
Automatic review of specified situations, such as scoring plays or late-game moments, removes that decision and applies review consistently regardless of team behavior.
The standard for overturning is decisive
Most systems require clear evidence to reverse, leaving the original call standing when video is inconclusive. The call on the field therefore carries weight the video alone does not.
This is why identical footage can produce different outcomes depending on what was called originally, which spectators reasonably find frustrating.
A minority of situations are reviewed to determine the correct outcome outright rather than to check the existing call, and those are defined narrowly.
Centralized review changed the mechanics
Several leagues moved review to a central facility where officials watch every game with full camera access and communicate with the on-field crew.
Consistency improves because the same group reviews plays across all games, rather than each crew applying its own judgment at a field monitor.
The tradeoff is a perception of remoteness, since the decision is made by people the crowd cannot see and the explanation reaches viewers indirectly.
Camera coverage limits what review can do
Review can only examine angles that exist. Nationally televised games carry many more cameras than routine ones, so the same play may be reviewable in one game and not another.
Frame rate matters as much as angle, because a ball can cross a line between frames and no amount of examination will recover the missing instant.
Tracking technologies that measure position directly, rather than photographing it, resolve some of these cases and have been adopted where the geometry is simple.
Time cost shapes what is reviewable
Every review interrupts play, and leagues balance accuracy against pace. Time limits and restrictions on reviewable categories both follow from that concern.
Judgment calls are generally excluded, because reviewing them would expand the number of stoppages without producing agreement.
The line between judgment and fact is itself contested, and shifting it is where most rule changes in this area occur.