I didn't catch this, did you?

Long overdue. You think with all the money, cameras, technology... this would be a foregone conclusion.

Somewhere in Buffalo you can hear someone yelling one year to late!

JR44 wrote:
Somewhere in Buffalo you can hear someone yelling one year to late!

I honestly don't feel Allen got that first down. Everyone says the Bills got screwed, but I don't think he even got it.

Canthony wrote:

I honestly don't feel Allen got that first down. Everyone says the Bills got screwed, but I don't think he even got it.

I didn't think it was close and maybe an even worse spot that has been overlooked is the play before that on the on the pass to the TE was a first down.  NFL was not going to let Swift, I mean KC lose.

JR44 wrote:

I didn't think it was close and maybe an even worse spot that has been overlooked is the play before that on the on the pass to the TE was a first down.  NFL was not going to let Swift, I mean KC lose.

That was the play before. Not the one in question, but I agree. The play before Kinkaid got that first down. IMO

Good move and long overdue, but down and distance isn't the biggest problem.

So the league can mandate that stadiums have 6 cameras (in specified spots?) for Hawkeye, even though it’s been unwilling to mandate how many cameras and in what locations there are for the instant replay system? I kid. I’m not 100% sure how this works, but it kind of sounds like it’s not going to fix the ref poorly spotting the ball, but only whether or not it’s a first down or not. Like so the ref determines where the ball was and puts the ball down on the ground. Hawkeye tells you if that’s a first down or not. It’s not going to tell you whether the ball while in the players hands crossed the first down line or whether it’s a touchdown or not. The ref still determines that. Am I misunderstanding how this works?

Yes I did see it. The chain gang will still be utilized as a back (in case this fantastic technology fails for some reason...I mean, what could go wrong with technology?)

Montana Tom wrote:
Yes I did see it.  The chain gang will still be utilized as a back (in case this fantastic technology fails for some reason...I mean, what could go wrong with technology?)

How long before some resourceful tech bro with a gambling habit hacks into the system and controls inches with a joystick?

MaroonBells wrote:

How long before some resourceful tech bro with a gambling habit hacks into the system and controls inches with a joystick?

Or ... one person in a dark room next door to the NY review room says the desired outcome ... and the machine does it and makes a fancy graphic proving that it's unquestionably true.

It's like the AI in Israel making decisions on which Palestinians deserve to be killed.  Does it just say yes, because that's the correct answer or because it's the "correct" answer.  Either way it puts the decision into a machine that you can't really audit (if you don't want to) and can't really blame.  The people involved can just say, "The machine did it and the machine is always right, because people in lab coats made it and science and whatnot." or "It's AI, we don't really know how it works, but AI is smarter than people so how could we know?"

In a decently auditable system, it will need to spit out the machines results in real time.  So let's say there's a controversy on a crucial 3rd down, you need to know what it calculated for the line of scrimmage before first down happened, to prove that the somebody didn't tell the machine the right answer and it fudged the original line of scrimmage to prove it was right at the end.

I guarantee you, it will be pretty snappy most of the time, and at some crucial point in time, it will take longer than normal for the machine to calculate a result.  They'll probably put on a show, telling the players to back away from the ball so the cameras can see it better, and people will be like "The machine took too long, I bet they were rigging it." and someone will have to put out a video of where the ball was on first down and where it was after 3rd down, and trying to figure out if the machine was rigged or not.

Also, even assuming the ball has to be on the ground to be measured, I think they should really be analyzing how poorly the ref spots the ball in the situation where the player runs out of bounds, the sideline ref puts a ball on the ground by the sideline, they toss a different ball onto the field and try to place it at the same spot but on the hash, but sometimes they get that wrong. The machine should be perfectly capable of reading both of those balls positions and flagging if the 2nd ref was more than X inches off. Like if the center ref is a foot off, stop play and make him get it lined up right, unless it’s like 2 minute drill or something.

Great, now AI is going to ruin football too.