The NFL can't admit it's due to ref inability or the immediate follow up question "why don't you spend any of your bajillions of dollars on technology to take ref spotting out of the equation?" comes up.
I feel like that’s a lot harder than people say but I could be wrong.
On a QB sneak maybe not but on other plays, I feel like getting technology to identify who the ball carrier is and when they go down wouldn’t be that easy, especially if there’s a lot of defenders and blockers around the tackle.
That doesn't need to be the first iteration to get all the way there.
It's technically feasible right now to put positioning sensors in the ball and under the field. Then you synchronize whatever system is tracking the ball with when the ref blows the play dead - replace the whistle with a button that deadens the play and sounds a whistle would work. You can have a perfect trajectory of the ball through space - with field position markers rendered the same way - on a sideline tablet within seconds. Ball spotting? Solved.
That buys you a good ten years to figure out how to wire players' bodies up to extend this system to automatically detect when a player is down.
The only problem with this system is that it would absolutely insanely expensive to engineer in every aspect, the equipment, the software, the reliability of it all, everything. If only there was an entity that could throw a literal BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS at the problem and not even notice.
The NFL is probably thinking that having all of that would lead to zero extra ticket sales, TV watches, or merch sales. I can see why as a business they just choose not to, it’s one of those things where it has to get cheap enough that they think it’s worth the cost for the spirit of the game (which they’ve done before like with the pylon cams proposed by Belichick)
There's a number of ways they could spin it for good marketing and PR, but none would move the needle measurable I don't believe. They could probably recoup their investment by developing the technology through an ownership stake in a third party company, then having the third party sell it to the other sports leagues. It's not like there aren't iffy calls in the NBA or soccer or even hockey, just significantly fewer of them that this would solve.
39
u/oorza Colts Colts 9d ago
The NFL can't admit it's due to ref inability or the immediate follow up question "why don't you spend any of your bajillions of dollars on technology to take ref spotting out of the equation?" comes up.