In every NFL stadium, there are six ultra-high-definition cameras that, coupled with computer-vision software, can measure the distance between a football and a first-down line.
And in every NFL football, there is a coin-sized chip that, coupled with radio-frequency identification (RFID), transmits data on the movement and location of the ball.
And yet, when Josh Allen plunged into a pile of Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday, seeking a crucial fourth-and-1 conversion in the AFC championship game, neither technology was used to determine whether Allen had picked up a first down.
Instead, two referees sprinted in from the sidelines — one beyond the 40-yard line, one short of it. They decided, after manual measurements and inconclusive replays, that Allen hadn’t reached the line to gain. Kansas City took over, went on to score, and won. So the controversial ruling, which has been dissected ever since, reignited a prickly debate: Why, in 2025, with tech infiltrating every sport, does the NFL still rely on humans with obscured views to make heat-of-the-moment calls about whether balls crossed certain lines?
The unsatisfying answer is similar to what it was in 2021: The technology isn’t quite good enough, and the nature of football complicates it.
Critics argue that it could still help NFL officials on plays like the Josh Allen sneak. “It’s a perfect example that elevates a reasonable question,” says John Pollard, a former VP at Zebra Technologies, the NFL’s on-field tracking provider. He and others have argued for years that the RFID tracking (the microchips), perhaps in concert with optical tracking (the cameras and computers), “could be the recipe for accurate ball-spotting.”
But the league, as its vice president of emerging products and technology Matt Swensson told Yahoo Sports in 2021, hasn’t been “ready to pull the trigger on that yet.” (Swensson and an NFL spokesman declined to answer follow-up questions this week about why not.)
Prior to the 2024 season, the NFL’s Competition Committee and “Future of Football Committee” approved trials of Hawk-Eye, an optical tracking system similar to the one that instantaneously detects whether tennis balls were in or out, and whether soccer balls crossed goal lines.
Hawk-Eye, though, couldn’t help on the Josh Allen play, in part because it relies on cameras, which need unobstructed views of the ball.
It was tested this past preseason, and “in the background” throughout the 2024 regular season, not as an automatic spotter, but rather as a replacement for the chain gang. For now, it still requires human officials to spot the ball; only then does it virtually measure distance to the first-down line.
Anything more impactful or immediate is “complicated,” as Swensson and others said, because football differs from other sports in two important ways.
First, obstructed views limit the potential of optical tracking. Balls disappear in a player’s arms or a pile of bodies. If Hawk-Eye systems can’t see it, they can’t (yet) place it on a digital, inch-perfect map of the field.
And second, the ball’s location often isn’t the sole consideration. On many plays, officials must determine the ball’s location when or before a player’s knee, forearm or other body part touches the ground or when officials rule a play dead. That, said Dean Blandino, a former NFL vice president of officiating, has always been “the big roadblock” for automated ball-spotting.
Any real-time spotting system would need to detect not only the ball, but also every body part of the ball-carrier, and every whistle blown to rule forward progress stopped. It would then need to communicate a definitive conclusion to an on-field ref. Some believe that’ll never be feasible. Swensson said in 2021 that, someday, “it could be possible,” but he admitted: “We’re just not there yet.”
The near-consensus, instead, was that replay reviews were the first frontier. “A first logical step would be marrying up data and video,” Swensson said. A replay official could, for example, determine when a runner’s knee was down — or when Josh Allen’s forward progress was stopped — and then use tracking data to spot the ball at that exact moment in time.
When asked this week why the NFL hasn’t yet implemented such a system, a league spokesman would not comment.
Back in 2021, though, Swensson indicated that the tracking tech’s error margin — up to 6 inches — was a main reason for reluctance. “We’re not comfortable using ball tracking alone,” he said, “to say, ‘did the ball cross the plane.’”
Accuracy still isn’t there
The RFID tracking tech has been in place since 2017, when the NFL first inserted microchips into footballs. The chips, which are also affixed to players’ pads, have unlocked a bottomless vault of data. They’re the source of “Next Gen Stats,” and all sorts of metrics that teams now use to augment player evaluation and performance science.
They weren’t initially designed to aid referees. But by 2021, Pollard said, they were capable of “supporting [the] locationing of the ball, or identifying where a ball goes out of bounds, or potentially crosses a goal line.” Quietly, the NFL toyed with how that “locationing” could support officiating. They began by using it to track where punts flew out of bounds. In tech-savvy circles, there was an expectation that, before long, the RFID tracking would help with ball-spotting.
In 2025, however, its error margin is still “up to 6 inches,” a Zebra spokeswoman confirmed. That’s over half the length of a football.
Back in 2021, Swensson mentioned “a couple of inches, with a level of consistency,” as a potential threshold for ball-spotting use. Critics, of course, point out that any error margin could still be factored in on replay. If, for example, the tracking data told an NFL official in New York that the ball Josh Allen cradled was less than 6 inches across or short of the line to gain, the call on the field — whatever it was — could stand; but if the tech showed the ball 8 inches across the line, Buffalo could’ve had a first down.
It is unclear how seriously the NFL has explored this type of application. Its recent communications have focused on optical tracking. “For the coming seasons,” the league said in a news release last summer, “Hawk-Eye and the NFL will collaborate in the development of a next-generation officiating technology leveraging Hawk-Eye’s state-of-art line-to-gain optical tracking technology to review and make critical ruling on plays.”
Any new technology typically undergoes years of rigorous testing, often behind the scenes, to screen for unintended consequences.
“Unfortunately — or fortunately,” Pollard says, “a situation like Sunday heightens everything very quickly, and says: ‘Let’s just hurry up.’”
In fact, the Josh Allen play is exactly the type that multiple experts cited as a potential tipping point. They explained that the implementation of any new system required a cost-benefit analysis: How many incorrect calls, unfixable under current systems, would it correct? And would that accuracy, as Blandino said, “supersede the cost, and the manpower, the research, the technology [required],” without interrupting the flow of the sport and confusing or disillusioning viewers?
Absent “a widespread trend,” as Blandino said, or “an issue that is happening every game,” the only thing capable of tipping scales was a high-profile incident in a playoff game. Multiple people cited the no-call in the 2019 Rams-Saints NFC Championship Game, which led to a (since-scrapped) rule allowing coaches to challenge pass interference penalties, as precedent.
“That type of thing,” Blandino told Yahoo Sports in 2021, during a conversation about tracking technology and ball-spotting, ”would have to happen for this to progress to a point where [the NFL] would think about implementing it.”
