Chipping in with new technology in NFL
Now that the NFL’s last footballrelated story is (hopefully) over after hundreds of days and millions of dollars in attorney fees, the league can move on to something else: Namely, putting computer chips in the footballs to help determine if the uprights needed to be narrower.
As reported Sunday by the Toronto Sun’s John Kryk, the NFL plans to put computer chips into each football used for field goals in pre-season games this season. If that goes well enough, the experiment will continue during the league’s Thursday night games during the regular season. It’s all to give the league’s competition committee enough data to determine whether the league’s uprights needed to be narrower than 18 feet 6 inches.
Last year, the league moved extra points back, making them 33-yard attempts.
Kickers converted on 94.2 per cent of their attempts, down from 99.3 per cent in 2014 and the first time the percentage fell below 95 since 1979.
However, kickers still made 84.5 per cent of their field goal attempts, the second-highest conversion rate in NFL history.
“These ‘instrumented’ balls — with accompanying technology — will allow the league’s competition committee to determine, among other things, precisely how far inside the uprights all successful field goals (as well as extra points) have been kicked,” Kryk writes.
After this season, the league’s competition committee will take the data “and determine, if we do decide to shorten the distance between the uprights, what is the right distance, and where should it be to make it a more difficult kick,” Dean Blandino, the NFL’s director of officiating, told Kryk in an interview. Changes could be made for the 2017 season, Blandino said.
According to ESPN’s Kevin Seifert, the chip-equipped balls also could be used to give officials more precise information when they need to spot the balls near the first-down marker and could help them determine whether the ball crossed the goal-line.
Seifert says the league received feedback from a number of veteran NFL quarterbacks, who were asked to make sure the chipped balls didn’t feel any different and did not act differently in the air than non-chipped balls.