For more than 100 years, football has been officiated using a simple chain 10 yards long. The so-called chain gang has been the sport’s judge and jury, ruling whether a ball traveled the number of yards needed for a team to get a first down — and four more chances to score.
But artificial intelligence and new technology could soon make the chain gang obsolete, with an advanced system known as Hawk-Eye aspiring to make the game faster and more accurate by mashing together high-tech software with a lot of cameras.
In the 2024-25 preseason, the NFL tested Sony’s Hawk-Eye to make calls on “line to gain,” the officiating term for measuring the 10 yards a team needs to advance the ball to get a first down.
Hawk-Eye uses up to 60 cameras, including those used for broadcasts, to piece together every possible angle on a given football play. That’s useful for referees who use it to scrub through the action frame by frame when they’re making play calls, but Sony and the NFL are now taking it one step further.
Using feeds from six cameras with 8K resolution (four times as many pixels as a 4K camera), Hawk-Eye can now pinpoint the ball’s start and finish using artificial intelligence and determine whether it traveled the necessary 10 yards. Every NFL stadium is equipped to use Hawk-Eye for line to gain.
“We did a lot of due diligence with the NFL to make sure that we’ve chosen the right cameras and the right placement of the cameras to make sure that our accuracy was where it needed to be,” said Dan Cash, managing director of Sony’s Hawk-Eye.
Doing so would reduce the time it takes for the chain gang to haul the bright orange markers onto the field and gauge whether the ball passed the line to gain. The tech could cut down on controversial calls in matchups when inches can be all the difference.
In last weekend’s AFC conference title game between the Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs, Buffalo quarterback Josh Allen rushed forward on fourth-and-inches early in the fourth quarter. Though it appeared he may have gotten the first down, officials ruled he did not.
Kansas City got the ball back and scored a touchdown on their next drive. The Chiefs would win 32-29 and advance to the Super Bowl.
During the regular season, Washington Commanders fans were up in arms after officials ruled that tight end Zach Ertz was short of a first down, securing the Pittsburgh Steelers a win.
And in an infamous 2017 matchup between the Oakland Raiders and the Dallas Cowboys, then-NFL official Gene Steratore not only summoned the chain gang but also used an index card to rule that the ball did touch the line necessary for the Cowboys to earn a first down.
“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,” “NFL on NBC” play-by-play sportscaster Al Michaels said on the broadcast.
About seven years later, that high tech is now coming to the game.
NFL Deputy Chief Information Officer Aaron Amendolia said Hawk-Eye will also help make calls 40 seconds faster than pulling out the chains.
“We’re going to get much more accurate on what we’re showing as far as measurements, but we’re also going to have a faster-moving game,” Amendolia said.
Fred Gaudelli, the executive producer of “NFL on NBC,” said that makes for a better TV-viewing experience.
“As attention spans become shorter and people have more distractions in life, the quicker you can get things done and get to a final answer. I think it’s better for the broadcast and it’s better for the audience,” he said.
Football fanatics could notice a new element to their TV-viewing experience, as well, with Hawk-Eye feeding graphics that re-create ball positioning to show viewers exactly where the ball is relative to the line to gain.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because Sony Hawk-Eye is the same technology used in tennis. The U.S. Open uses Sony Hawk-Eye to gauge whether a ball was out of bounds, and it re-creates the action in an animatic graphic for viewers to see.
A preseason game between the Detroit Lions and the New York Giants fully deployed Hawk-Eye to determine whether a first down had been earned. Although Hawk-Eye was able to generate the image showing that the ball was indeed short, critics pointed out it took a while.
“Are we going to use it if it takes this long?” Giants preseason analyst Phil Simms asked on the broadcast.
There’s also the nostalgia factor with the chain gang, which some players aren’t willing to let go of.
“It’s a part of the game,” Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce said on the “New Heights” podcast.
The line-to-gain technology, wasn’t used in the regular season and isn’t being used for the current postseason, will be tested again next preseason.
“We need to have the right results,” Amendolia said, “and when we do, we’ll scale it up and out.”
The post Why AI could replace NFL first-down markers sooner than you might think appeared first on NBC News.
