The NFL has heard the criticism of its no-tech approach to determining whether the football made it to the line to gain. But instead of serving up solutions, the league is offering up excuses.
In comments to Rob Maaddi of the Associated Press, NFL V.P. of football business strategy Kimberly Fields, Esq. claimed that, while the NFL is close to embracing technology to determine whether a first down was earned, digital advances can’t replace the current procedure for spotting the ball.
“What this technology cannot do is take the place of the human element in determining where forward progress ends,” Fields told Maaddi. “There will always be a human official spotting the ball. Once the ball is spotted, then the line-to-gain technology actually does the measurement itself. So I think it’s probably been a point of confusion around what the technology can and can’t do. There will always be a human element because of the forward progress conversation.”
There’s no confusion about what the technology should do. Or about what the league should be doing to develop it.
How hard can it be to sync up the moment the officials determine that forward progress was stopped with the specific location of the ball when that occurs? It’s the whole purpose of incorporating technology as it relates to the placement of the ball.
We know where the line is. We need to know where the ball is.
And it’s on the league to figure out a way to do it.
The NFL has the money. The NFL has the incentive, even if it won’t admit it. Smarter people than me (that bar is low) can figure out how to do it, if they want to.
At this moment in the history of the game, the last thing anyone from the league should be saying is that “[t]here will always be a human element because of the forward progress conversation.” What Fields, and her bosses, should be saying is that the NFL is doing everything possible to fully incorporate digital methods for determining where the ball is when forward progress was stopped.
The strategic Friday-afternoon news dump from the league serves another purpose. When the Commissioner is questioned about the old-school, it-was-like-that-when-I-got-here approach to such an important aspect of officiating during his Monday press conference, he’ll simply cite the quotes from the AP article as support for his claim that there’s nothing that can be done.
And that we’ll just have to accept it.
We don’t. I won’t. No one should.
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