Despite being bitter AFC rivals, the head coaches of the New England Patriots and the Denver Broncos, Mike Vrabel and Sean Payton, have put forth a united front to call out the league over a major problem that persisted throughout the 2025 season. While the NFL remains the pinnacle of football, the league has its fair share of problems, especially with its replays, which were highly prevalent during the 1 p.m. ET games.

Highlighting this issue, members of the NFL’s competition committee, Mike Vrabel and Sean Payton, made strong statements during the NFL Combine and called out the league after the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations, Troy Vincent, described the problem as a lack of officials for these games.

“We need to evaluate staffing at that level,” Vrabel said, as per ESPN. “To find out and make sure that every game is treated the same, whether it’s the prime-time game on Sunday night or Monday or Thursday, or those one o’clock games that are the lifeblood of our league. If we need to figure out staffing issues that need to be taken care of, so that those things are looked at, and we’re not letting anything slip.”

Similarly, the Denver Broncos head coach expressed shock that the replay errors were specific to the 1 p.m. game and demanded immediate measures to curb the issue.

“I don’t like hearing that,” Payton said. “I want to play in the four o’clock window. I’m glad I’m in Denver. We should never have a work shortage in replay. Those are the things we’ll try to clean up and correct, as far as people and just finding out.”

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Mike Vrabel and Sean Payton’s concerns stem from Vincent’s data, which showed that the league would reconsider five out of 171 replay decisions from the 2025 regular season. Of the five, four took place at the 1 p.m. ET window. With two of the NFL’s most prominent competition committee voices making their frustrations impossible to ignore, commissioner Roger Goodell stepped forward with a proposed solution aimed at bringing the same standard of replay oversight to the 1 p.m. window that prime-time games have long enjoyed.

Goodell shares possible solution for NFL’s replay errors

The NFL has a major issue with replay accuracy, particularly during 1 p.m. games. Roger Goodell, the league commissioner, has suggested using technology to curb these issues moving forward. Goodell was speaking at a recent press conference where questions about these errors were raised.

“It’s a difficult sport to officiate,” Goodell said, as per NBC Sports. “It’s fast. It’s quick. And we have to be able to use technology, in my view, to try to prevent the obvious errors. Now, they’re not all obvious. I think, depending on which team you’re for, they’re obvious in your eyes potentially. But at the end of the day, we see that if there’s an obvious error, we need to be able to fix it. And I think technology can help that.”

The NFL’s replay accuracy problem has grown too big to ignore, forcing the league’s top voices to demand immediate action. With technology as a solution, the league now faces pressure to deliver consistent officiating standards across all game windows.