It's overdue for the NFL to use technology to determine ball placement
It's time. It was already time. It's definitely time now.
The technology exists to do it right. The only question is whether the NFL will make the leap — and write the check.
The ball needs to be equipped with digital components that will allow for an exact measurement as to whether a player scored a touchdown or, as it relates to Sunday night's AFC Championship, whether a first down was gained.
The current system is far too imperfect. And those imperfections showed tonight. Human beings using their eyes and feet to see through and around bodies in an effort to determine how far the runner carried the ball.
As CBS rules analyst Gene Steratore said, it looked like quarterback Josh Allen got the ball to the line to gain before he was pulled backward on fourth and short early in the fourth quarter, with the Bills leading 22-21.
It's hard to make a proper spot in real time, and it's even harder to determine with replay review whether Allen made it.
The separate problem, of course, is the lack of transparency in the NFL's replay-review process. Who's making the decisions? Who's in the room when the decisions are made? What angles are they looking at?
In the end, there's no reason to rely on the frailties of human estimation. Too much rides on the outcome of these games for the league to not invest in precision.
They can do it. They need to do it. While a flawed call in such circumstances always hurts one team and helps the other, that's no way to ensure consistent accuracy. Or to ensure that the team that won the game truly and fully earned it.
Maybe the Chiefs still would have won if the Buffalo drive had continued. The point is that the league's stubborn insistence to rely on what the officials think they saw must yield to technology that can erase all doubt.
Everyone should want that. Until the NFL feels enough pressure from the teams, media, fans, and perhaps even Congress to fix it, the league won't choose to do it.
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