I feel like it could be tricky figuring out how to implement it. You don’t want it lighting something up a la hockey, because you’d have it literally going off any time a pass crosses the goal line or whatever. And also it does nothing for plays where the ball obviously crossed the plane but the argument is about being down first.
Since Pfizer got FDA approval.
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The lighting up can be in a spot where only booth officials can see it.
For questions about whether someone is down or not, just play back the tape and see when the light goes off. If it’s after he is down, then TD good.
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They did it mid season?
Might have helped if 35 on the Ravens didn’t just give up.
I fell asleep before the game. Heard Danny Dimes was a beast.
I heard a discussion that the precision isn’t enough for the close calls yet.
Can’t wait for the inevitable Chipgate.
This is why I’m not sold on robotic officiating.
I mean you have to account for any edge of the football crossing the plane, and it wouldn’t necessarily be just the tips of the ball (look at Huntley’s dive yesterday before the fumble, it would have been some random spot just off the fat part of the ball that crossed, probably), so where do you place the chip exactly?
A round ball probably makes this easier because you put it in the center and just sense when the chip is closer to the goal line than the ball’s radius. With a football, would you just put two chips equidistant from the center (like the ball’s “foci” or whatever) and triangulate from there?
This is what I was thinking. If you know the two chips’ placement and the ball’s dimensions, shouldn’t you be able to replicate the full 3-d position relative to the goal line?
The quoted accuracy of a chip is apparently +/- 6" up to 10" which obviously doesn’t make a ton of sense when stated that way as opposed to a probability distribution. Not sure how much of an increase you could expect by using TWO chips. That would depend entirely on how the errors are correlated.
I was wondering you could put something on the goal lines and have a portable something on the 1st down marker that would provide a very local barrier to cross or at least compare with the chip(s).
(Some kind of lazer line? Obviously could build into the field for the goal line not sure what for the first down)
I don’t know enough about the intricacies of the technology, but anything that requires being set by a human (yard markers) is going to have some minimal amount of error which could just end up canceling some of the precision you thought you were gaining.
I think that’s why RFID is more promising. Like, let’s say they could get it down to a global maximum error of 3” on the Y axis, we would snap accept that over what is currently in place, right? There’s no way refs plus chain crew are that accurate now.
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There’s another obvious problem which is that it has to be synced to when the runner is down.
I thought they did a nice job with this during one of this weekend’s games, where they synced two different videos side by side to show when the runner was down on screen 1 and, from a different angle, where the ball was relative to the first down market on screen 2.
I’m sure that wasn’t the first time they’ve done it, but that was the first time I had seen them do it in game.
The laser doesn’t know when someone’s knee hits though.
Tennis is pretty straight forward. Did the ball land on the line or no
Frame syncing the video should be trivial given modern equipment and expertise of the people running it. Syncing live ball data presents some different technical challenges.
For example, there’s going to be a hard cap on accuracy determined by the frame rate (let’s just assume the ball is transmitting at a higher rate than the video). If the ball carrier is moving at 20 ft/s around the time of the critical event, then at 60 FPS there’s gonna be about 4” between frames we’ll never see. I’m just picking even numbers to make a point, but this is the reason why FIFA went to tracking cameras and away from video.
Seems like they could probably implement toenail offside in NFL right now though. I’m totally for anything like that which leads to Bosa meltdowns.
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