Published on April 11th, 2022 📆 | 2872 Views ⚑
0USFL Debuting Technology To Eliminate Chain Gangs For Measurement
The USFL will officially get underway this week, with the latest incarnation of the league kicking off its inaugural season with a Saturday game against the New Jersey General and the Birmingham Stallions. As is always expected in these smaller leagues, there is an expectation that the game will look different in certain significant ways, in one form or another.
One of the interesting experiments the USFL is conducting is by (finally) incorporating technology into the process of ball placement, though not without significant human input. Technically, we already saw this, as they did play a preseason game, but for the first time in an official football game, the USFL will use chips in the footballs to help them take distance measurements. Gone are the arbitrary chain gangs.
Very similar to how technology is used in tennis to determine whether the ball is inbounds or not, the leagueâs games will be officiated using this technology to tell the officials where the ball is relative to the field.
This all doesnât necessarily lead to better results, automatically. Iâm sure there is still data to be collected on just how accurately the chip can detect where the football is, given that it is of an unconventional shape. I donât know the full mechanics of how it will be implemented, but I would imagine it also still comes down to an official placing the ball where he believes it was when a play was whistled dead.
Still, anything that gets rid of the ridiculous chain gang that essentially involves a couple of part-time employees eyeballing where they think they were standing on the sideline 10 yards apart is something Iâm in favor of, even if as only a stepping stone to a more permanent solution down the road.
Iâm sure weâve all seen enough instances of officials even struggling to actually compare where the football is to where the chain is once they do get it down on the field, even getting the call wrong or having to go to ridiculous lengths to guesstimate whether or not itâs right up against the chain.
So much of the sport remains antiquated in terms of how itâs run without modern improvements, but of course improvements are not available for every facet of the game. Still, given the rise in significance of betting, something like ball placement and ensuring its accuracy is only going to become more and more important in the future.
Or donât you think somebody will sue the NFL if a game is decided on what appears to be an inaccurate measurement by a chain gang, costing people millions of dollars in the process? Theyâve already faced lawsuits for other outcomes, even if nothing comes out of them almost every time.
Gloss