The NFL will use technology for virtual line-to-gain measurements next season, but officials will continue to spot the ball.
“The goal is for it to come online in 2025,” Kimberly Fields, the NFL’s senior vice president of football operations, said Wednesday.
The chain gang will remain as a backup.
The league tested Sony’s Hawk-Eye tracking services in the 2024 preseason and in the background during the 2024 regular season. The optimal tracking system notifies officials instantly if a first down was reached.
The technology does not track the ball, with officials still needing to spot it, but replay assist will confirm accuracy of that placement. Since the technology requires additional cameras in every stadium, there will be more — and better — replay angles of forward progress.
Six cameras will be used for the virtual line-to-gain technology, along with 12 boundary-line cameras and 14 Hawk-Eye’s SkeleTRACK cameras that monitor more than two-dozen skeletal points on a player’s body. All 30 NFL stadiums, and the international stadiums where the league plays, will be equipped with a total of 32 cameras.
This spring, the league will continue to test and train during UFL games played in Detroit’s Ford Field.
“We used this in the background last season,” Fields said. “The goal for 2025 is to continue to train our techs, who are the ones who will be utilizing the technology, finalizing all of our officiating processes and procedures around virtual measurements and testing the graphics for the broadcast and in-stadium, so fans in the stadium and fans watching on television can see what we’re doing. The chain crew will see be there as backup.”
The league saw a reduction in the time it took for a measurement from the average 75 seconds it takes for a chain measurement to 30 seconds in the virtual line-to-gain technology testing.
The technology may or may not have overturned Josh Allen’s fourth-down quarterback sneak that was ruled short of the line to gain in the fourth quarter of the Bills’ 32-29 loss to the Chiefs in the AFC Championship Game. Under the new system, officials still will spot the ball, but the additional high-tech cameras might have provided evidence that Allen reached the line to gain, if he indeed did.
