Football has been officiated with a basic 10-yard chain for over a century. As the sport’s judge and jury, the so-called chain gang has decided whether a ball went the required number of yards to give a team a first down and four more scoring opportunities.
However, new technology and artificial intelligence may soon render the chain gang obsolete. Hawk-Eye, a sophisticated system, aims to improve game speed and accuracy by combining sophisticated algorithms with numerous cameras.
The NFL evaluated the ability of Sony’s Hawk-Eye to make calls on line to gain—the officiating phrase for calculating the 10 yards a team must progress the ball to get a first down—during the 2024–25 preseason.
Hawk-Eye pieces together every perspective of a football play using up to 60 cameras, including broadcast cameras. When making play calls, officials can utilize that to go through the action frame by frame, but Sony and the NFL are now going one step further.
Hawk-Eye can now use artificial intelligence to locate the start and end of the ball and decide whether it went the required 10 yards by using feeds from six 8K cameras, which have four times as many pixels as a 4K camera. Every NFL stadium has Hawk-Eye installed for line-to-gain.
Dan Cash, managing director of Sony’s Hawk-Eye, stated, “We conducted extensive due diligence with the NFL to ensure that we have selected the appropriate cameras and the proper placement of the cameras to ensure that our accuracy was where it needed to be.”
By doing this, the chain gang would have less time to carry the vivid orange markers into the field and determine if the ball crossed the line to gain. When inches can make all the difference in a match, the technology could reduce contentious rulings.
Josh Allen, the quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, surged forward on fourth-and-inches early in the fourth quarter of the Kansas City Chiefs vs. Buffalo Bills AFC conference championship game last weekend. Officials decided he didn’t get the first down, even though it looked like he might have.
On their subsequent drive, Kansas City recovered the ball and scored a touchdown. The Chiefs would go to the Super Bowl after winning 32-29.
Fans of the Washington Commanders were furious during the regular season when referees determined that tight end Zach Ertz had failed to get a first down, giving the Pittsburgh Steelers the victory.
Additionally, former NFL official Gene Steratore utilized an index card to determine that the ball did strike the line required for the Cowboys to earn a first down in a notorious 2017 game between the Oakland Raiders and the Dallas Cowboys, in addition to calling in the chain gang.
The NFL on NBC play-by-play sportscaster Al Michaels stated during the broadcast, “Here we are, across the bay from Silicon Valley, the high-tech capital of the world, and you got an index card that determines whether it’s a first down or a fourth down.”
That high-tech is now entering the game, around seven years later.
According to Aaron Amendolia, the NFL’s Deputy Chief Information Officer, Hawk-Eye will also help make calls 40 seconds faster than removing the chains.
As far as measurements go, we’re going to be much more accurate, but we’re also going to have a faster-paced game, Amendolia stated.
According to NBC’s NFL executive producer Fred Gaudelli, that improves the TV-watching experience.
You can complete tasks and arrive at a final solution more quickly when people’s attention spans shorten and their lives grow more distracted. “I believe it’s better for the audience and the broadcast,” he remarked.
With Hawk-Eye supplying graphics that replicate ball positioning to show viewers precisely where the ball is in relation to the line to gain, football fans may also notice a new element to their TV-watching experience.
If you recognize that, it’s because tennis uses the same technology as Sony Hawk-Eye. In order to determine if a ball was out of bounds, the U.S. Open uses Sony Hawk-Eye, which displays the action in an animated graphic for spectators to observe.
Hawk-Eye was used extensively in a preseason game between the Detroit Lions and the New York Giants to assess if a first down had been earned. Critics noted that it took some time, even though Hawk-Eye was able to produce the image demonstrating that the ball was in fact short.
If it takes this long, will we utilize it? Phil Simms, a Giants preseason commentator, posed the question during the broadcast.
Some players are unwilling to let go of the chain gang because of the nostalgic appeal.
Travis Kelces, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, stated on the New Heights podcast that it’s a part of the game.
Next preseason, the line-to-gain technology—which was not utilized during the regular season and is not being employed during the current postseason—will be put to the test once more.
Amendolia stated that we would scale it up and out once we achieve the desired outcomes.