I have to admit that I love the instant-replay rules in college football, because particularly inept officials aren't allowed as much of an opportunity to influence the game because the coaches have run out of challenges. And because the booth technically reviews every play, nothing goes unnoticed -- unless it is not a reviewable play.

That means that the number of plays that are reviewable should be as high as possible: If what happened on the play can be determined with some degree of objectivity, it should be subject to another look-see. That should also apply to some penalties -- the ones that are largely objective should be reviewable.

What are some penalties that I would include in the list?

Face mask: This one is, to me, pretty easy. You can clearly see on review if the player in question is grabbing the face mask or not. The review would be limited to that question -- did the player's hand make contact with the face mask? -- and not whether it was long enough to be penalized. It's a 15-yard penalty, we ought to be able to make sure.

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I am not a reporter by trade, but despite that fact, I'm able to track a news cycle about as close as anyone can. I am very glad about that fact, because it can be a whole lot of fun.

Two stories this year have had a red alert-type status where you never know what changes from one hour to the next: the conference expansion cycle over the summer, and this Cameron Newton saga going on right now. It was a wild ride from one Chip Brown report to the next as the Big 12 went from fine to dead to tenuously reborn. If you're not sure how much the Newton story has changed, just see how many updates I've issued for my wrap up post that I published just two days ago.

One thing I've learned through both episodes is that you can't underestimate the role of Twitter through everything. There are a lot of crackpots and attention hounds on Twitter, so you have to be careful who you follow. However, just about every journalist and reporter is on there now, and following this conference's beat writers it the easiest way to get up-to-the-minute information.

Don't get me wrong, the traditional news outlets have been all over the story. ESPN and the New York Times broke the Newton story initially. Radio interviews are key parts of the narrative. Newspaper beat writers have reported on the story as vigorously as ever.

However, Twitter has emerged as the condiut that binds them all together. Reporters do their reporting, but Twitter is where they find out what all the others have. Can't listen to a particular radio interview? No worries; someone is live-tweeting it. Even the infamous Paul Finebaum, one of the most well-connected people in the South, has been citing Twitter reports during his shows the past two weeks rather than relying on people to call or email him updates.

Twitter in and of itself hasn't driven these stories, though. And one thing that's been almost useless? Google News. Those facts are not surprising.

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I've thought for years that the future of TV is the Internet. Eventually, we'll get to watch anything ever filmed whenever we want to. I was never quite sure how the execution would go, but I instinctively knew almost from the first postage stamp-sized Quicktime video I saw on a website in elementary school that one day the Internet would provide all our video needs.

We're definitely moving in that direction thanks to services like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. The only thing standing in the way is licensing deals from content providers. In the case of Netflix, they're doing things correctly. In the case of the SEC Digital Network, they're not. And for now, you generally have to hook up an extra box to your TV to get at these things on your television, though some day, it'll all be integrated right into your TV like a better and smarter version of these Samsung TVs that are being splashed all over the SBNation sites.

But while archived TV and movies are going that way, I doubt live TV will ever disappear. I used to be convinced that it'd be gone in a couple of decades, but it's too useful. Sometimes you don't know what you want, so you channel surf. When new episodes of shows are ready to be released, they have to be released at a certain date and time. Live TV as it exists now is as good a solution for that as any.

Live sports are the really big fish here though. You could just post a link to a video feed of a new TV show episode and be done with it, but sports have to be streamed live. I guess SNL and presidential speeches fall into the same categories, but the mechanism of delivering live sports won't ever be considerably different than it is now.

That's not to say that watching sports won't remain the same. Here are some ways that watching live sports will change over the coming years.

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Full Disclosure Bit: Samsung is sponsoring a series of posts around SB Nation over the next few weeks focusing on technology and sports. The broad topic is the only thing that has been dictated to us; whether we choose to participate in the campaign and what we choose to write about that topic is still under Team Speed Kills' editorial control. We just want our readers to know that.

As another weekend of SEC football approaches, let's acknowledge that multibillion dollar deals that the conference worked out with ESPN and CBS have largely been a boon for both fans and the league's athletics departments. There's only one real blockbuster game on the menu this weekend -- Georgia vs. Florida in the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party -- and yet every game will be widely available. Sure, you'll need ESPNU to find Kentucky at Mississippi State and The SEC Network or ESPN3.com to watch Tennessee at South Carolina. But compared to where we were 10 years ago, when some of those games weren't on television and certainly weren't on the non-existent ESPN3, that's incredible progress.

What hasn't worked out so well is the SEC Digital Network, the partnership between the SEC and XOS Digital that was announced more than a year ago to great fanfare. The conference made the right decision by reserving the digital rights for itself and the rebroadcast rights for itself and its schools, but it hasn't made a good call on how to use those rights, even by the standards of its own announced plans for the Digital Network.

Content won't include live games, but the league said full replays and searchable highlights will be available, along with post-game interviews, press conferences and breaking news. Much of the content will be available within minutes of a game's conclusion, the league said. Also available will be nearly 10,000 hours of video from the SEC's library.

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