A controversial ball spot call in the AFC championship game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills invited plenty of criticism of the NFL's officiating crew, as well as its process for measuring first downs, which many believe to be outdated.
However, the league is reportedly considering using an electronic system to measure first downs in 2025, according to a report from The Washington Post this weekend.
During his yearly press conference ahead of the Super Bowl, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell on Monday said he believes the league will eventually use technology to digitally measure first downs, but emphasized the need to get it right.
Roger Goodell was asked about the calls in the Buffalo Bills-Kansas City AFC championship game, and if in the future, the NFL will use more technology for those calls. He thinks that will happen one day, but emphasizes need to test it and need to get it right. Full answer: pic.twitter.com/0nKmqbq84Z
— katherine fitzgerald (@kfitz134) February 3, 2025
"We tested in the preseason this past year on being able to use that technology," Goodell said. "It is complicated. Obviously, you have a lot of humanity that interferes potentially with some of that, at least from a camera angle standpoint. You also have a shape of the ball that is different."
"And it's about where the ball is, not where the individual is, necessarily. So, there are a combination of factors there but I do think that technology will exist sometime in the future. We're continuing a lot with our partners ... How to advance that as quickly as possible so we can get to that place."
The league's process for measuring ball spots and forward progress came under scrutiny after Bills quarterback Josh Allen was ruled short of the line to gain on a fourth down QB sneak in the fourth quarter of Buffalo's AFC title game loss. Multiple pundits, former NFL officials and even Bills coach Sean McDermott stated their belief that the league was incorrect in its ruling of the call.
The NFL's V.P. of football business strategy Kimberly Fields, Esq. told the Associated Press in an interview after the AFC championship game that the league, which tested Sony's Hawkeye tracking services for line-to-gain measurements in the preseason and in the background during the regular season as Goodell noted, is close to fully implementing the technology.
But Fields also maintained the importance of the "human element" in such calls.
"What this technology cannot do is take the place of the human element in determining where forward progress ends," Fields said. "There will always be a human official spotting the ball. Once the ball is spotted, then the line-to-gain technology actually does the measurement itself."
"So I think it’s probably been a point of confusion around what the technology can and can’t do. There will always be a human element because of the forward progress conversation."
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Roger Goodell Addresses Potential Implementation of Ball-Spot Technology in NFL.
