Kurtenbach

Cowboys went for it on fourth down, running a quarterback sneak up the middle with Dak Prescott.

Amid a pile of humanity, and needing to get the ball to the 40-yard line to gain the first down, Prescott dove forward, and the referees determined that the ball advanced to the inside of the 40-yard line and called out the chains for a measurement.

The distance between the edge of the yardmarker pole and the tip of the ball was indiscernible. Lead official Gene Steratore pulled out a piece

of folded paper — some watching on television thought it was an index card, giving the game its soon-to-be-infamous name — and slid it between the tip of the ball and the yard-marker pole.

After sliding the piece of paper — again, folded — Steratore declared that the Cowboys had gained the first down.

The Raiders were livid. The Cowboys were thrilled with the call. Dallas finished the drive with a chip-shot field goal that proved to be the difference in the game after Derek Carr fumbled out of the end zone with less than a minute to play.

I’ve never seen a referee use a piece of paper

to determine the distance between the first-down marker and the tip of the ball, and so far as I can tell, there’s no established protocol for using such a prop.

That’s not to say that Steratore should not have used the folded piece of paper — whatever tool he can use to help him determine the call should be used — but it is to say that no one but him understood the methodology for its usage.

Did he slide the paper in at an angle and attempt to move it to parallel with the first-down line? Would that be a good way to determine if the ball was past the marker?

Or was he determining how much space there was

between the post and the ball? If that was the case, why was it a first down for Dallas?

Steratore did a terrible job in explaining himself after the game, telling a pool reporter that the piece of paper only “reaffirmed” what he had already determined with his eyes: that the Cowboys had earned a first down.

The use of that piece of paper was bizarre and created unnecessary controversy — had Steratore not decided to slide that paper in front of the ball and had just trusted his eyes to call the first down, I’d venture to say that the situation would not have been as controversial.

Alas, it was, and hopefully

the ridiculousness of it all sparks major changes in the NFL.

The NFL has already experimented with microchips in regular-season game balls to determine if the league should decrease the width of goal posts. Perhaps that same technology could be used to determine if the ball actually crossed certain planes during games.

If the technology that’s already been in practice won’t work — if the piles of humanity that typically surround the ball in shortyardage situations complicate things — then the NFL should spend some of its incredible cash resources to develop an inball microchip (or two)

that can be pinpointed — much like tennis’ Hawkeye system — amid a pile of 300-pound men. Football GPS.

How much would that technology cost? A few million? Take that out of the budget to deny the existence of CTE — the world, and the game, would be better off for that.

Did the Cowboys actually get a first down on that QB sneak Sunday? I don’t know. The players don’t know. The referees don’t really know, either.

It’s about to be 2018 and the NFL is at least an 11-figure business — we shouldn’t have guesstimations and folded pieces of paper determining the outcome of games.