Did anybody see them measure for a first down in the preseason game? This is going to drive us absolutely insane. They flipped to a computer generated virtual environment which looks like Atari or something and it tells you how short you are of the line to gain we are going to lose a game on a computer pixel, how fun — by the way they changed the rules of the game that lasted for over a 100 years because the Buffalo Bills lost a playoff game and bitched about it
Thank goodness. I'm so sick of the bullshit measuring chain gang. This is 2025, not 1960. Time to stop fearing technology. This kind of tech has been around for a long time. Crazy how lazy the NFL has been with this.
Tech is good if it’s for the betterment of the game and the chain gang has long needed an update. The horseshit they flashed on the screen as some new way to message was a complete joke. Describing it as Atari-looking is pretty accurate. They make laser tape measures. I use them all the time. No idea why they can’t use something like that together with a computer system.
they dont want to put a chip in the football and base it on that. I understand why because that just shows you where the ball is and nothing about where/when the player is down, which will always require human decision making. the only thing they can really do is this half-assed thing where they solely replace the chains with a computer-generated chain gang. The chains themselves were never the problem, they were 10 yards exactly since the beginning of football. You can trust that more than a computer estimate of 10 yards even. Clearly the point of contention is and has always been about the spot of the football. but Buffalo bitched and here we are with this stupid compromise..
again, the spot of the ball, the most important part of this situation is still being done by humans.
I'm sure that's what we'll hear when the computer rules something that we don't see on the field. The only way this works if it is an independent body managing those systems, which we know will never really happen.
