The newborn National Football League season brings with it the 10th anniversary of full-blown instant replay review, and, while this column urges that you celebrate responsibly, there will be no celebration of any kind by its author.

I don't like instant replay review.

More lyrically, I don't want it, you can have it, it's too phat for me.

Sure, people think it's great because, as they love to say, the point is to get it right, and it sure is comforting that a culture that gets things pretty reliably wrong six days a week suddenly brings a chilling exactitude to Sunday football. But it is not about getting the play right. It is about not wanting to have a guy who spent the week selling ski goggles in California mess up the more than 300 man hours of preparation per week put in by the coaching staff just because the official is, you know, human.

On any given football play, multiple mistakes are made by up to 22 humans on the field and dozens of others in the play design and counter-design industries, but the number of mistakes made by the officials are expected to total zero.

Alas, 10 years of writing sentences similar to that last one has been about as effective as Najeh Davenport returning a kickoff.

Last season, for the third year in a row, total replay reviews in the NFL exceeded 300, and, for the first time in replay's history, a majority of coaches' challenges resulted in a reversal, 117 of 229 to be precise. In 2003, only 36 percent of challenges resulted in a reversal. Challenges nearly doubled from a low of 133 in 1999 to 2007's high of 250.

This will be the proof a lot of people need to tell you that NFL officiating is worse than ever, but it's more likely a case of the coaching staffs better evaluating the prudence of a challenge, because if there's anything coaches hate worse than an official's mistake it's wasting a timeout.

The challenge system was designed to limit the number of stoppages for replay, but the mechanism encourages coaches to spin the technology wheel. True, unsuccessful challenges result in the loss of timeouts, but a coach who has two successful challenges is somehow awarded a third.

That's right, a bonus challenge.

I guess this is the way that the NFL is most like the Game Show Network. Can the head coach phone a friend?

Helpfully, only four kinds of boundary plays, seven kinds of passing plays and eight kinds of miscellaneous plays are subject to review. That's it. We don't want to be here all day.

This makes sense, doesn't it?

Streaker on the field interfering with someone running a skinny post?

Not reviewable.

Terrell Owens getting that second big toe down to move the chains?

We'll look at that over and over and over until half the country has seen it more than the Zapruder film.

In his too brief stint in the "Monday Night Football" booth, perhaps Dennis Miller's best observation was about this: One of Miller's broadcast partners mentioned that, even though one particular replay review was taking a long time, that it was OK because "the point is to get it right."

"Yes," Miller said, "but a minute ago we were at a football game, and now we're at an autopsy."

Reviews are not supposed to last more than 60 seconds from the time the referee begins his review at the field-level monitor, but, apparently, each referee has all his timeouts remaining or has procured some timeouts through some unpublished provision of the replay system, perhaps by having an exemplary record of not having been forced to a replay monitor for the past six weeks.

Again this season, lest you have forgotten, coaches may not challenge in the final two minutes of either half or in overtime, as all reviews are then triggered by a replay official upstairs. There is no limit to the number of reviews the replay official can order and no real deterrent to discourage him from reviewing every single play once he is involved.

Luckily, the replay officials aren't the least bit mischievous. Their primary motivation is to keep from falling asleep during such riveting theater as Lions-Packers, Raiders-49ers and Browns-Bengals. The incidence of replay reviews during the final minutes of those matchups is suspiciously low, but I have no indisputable visual evidence that anything untoward is afoot.