Just put a chip in the ball, they say
Electronic refereeing won't solve the NFL's problems. Ask tennis fans.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, Eben pours cold water on a popular NFL take.
It’s one of the NFL’s greatest flaws, and it was impossible to miss on Sunday.
Early in the fourth quarter with his team up 22-21, Bills quarterback Josh Allen was stopped short on 4th-and-1 near midfield. Or was he? After the whistle, one line judge’s spot seemed to imply a first down, but he was overruled by the judge on the opposite side. Video replays caused similar disagreement across social media. Many thought Allen was short. A louder chorus believed they saw a clear first down.
The play instantly resurrected a popular complaint held by NFL fans and media members: Why hasn’t the NFL, with its $22 billion in yearly revenue, solved this problem with better technology? The take was unavoidable on social media, podcasts1 and talk radio around the country.
I agree there’s a better way to do this, but if you think putting a chip in the ball will make this issue disappear, you fundamentally miscalculate how much aggrievance, perceived bias and conspiracy theories have shaped modern sports fandom. Those complaints won’t change when IBM’s Watson is making the high-leverage calls instead of Ed Hochuli III.
Football fans often point to tennis’s line-calling technology, done mostly by Sony-owned Hawk-Eye,2 as an example of what this looks like. Anyone who follows the sport closely, however, can likely spot the fault in that argument. Tennis’s electronic line-calling hasn’t solved its line-calling challenges. Far from it. Sometimes the tech misfunctions in hilariously obvious ways. Players have voiced their frustrations as well. Former French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko, well-known for her distrust of the technology, became a running joke on Tennis Twitter following the Bills-Chiefs game.
But most notably, distrust in the live electronic calls has infected tennis fans. During this year’s Australian Open, many on social media were taking frame-by-frame screenshots of calls, holding them up as proof of mistakes. Take a look at this example, from Coco Gauff’s fourth-round win over Belinda Bencic 👇
This was posted on X by user @Nole_fan_girl, with the note: “Dear Australian Open your Hawkeye3 needs to be recalibrated. How is this called in?” The original post has nearly 700,000 impressions. Depending on where you are in her replies, there’s either consensus that this is rampant, or that it’s an illusion. Some said it showed the match was fixed. Others alleged that the frame rate for replays isn’t fast enough to show how far a ball can skid when it’s touching the ground.
For what it’s worth, I’m in that last camp. This photo 👇, posted to X by user @kakoto13 and allegedly from the same bounce, feels like some important added context.
Here’s another example, from a different user 👇. Is this ball clearly out to you? It’s not to me. But the first comment underneath it is, “this is soooo bad.”
Electronic assistance in tennis line-calling dates back to 1980—earlier than I expected—when Cyclops tech was introduced at Wimbledon. It was used primarily for challenges to human-made calls until a major shift in 2020, when live electronic line-calling debuted at many tournaments. The shots are mapped via a collection of expensive, high resolution cameras that triangulate the ball’s position as it moves and calculate the size and location of its contact with the court.
While it’s hard to find reliable stats on the accuracy of the various tech, many companies seem to claim ~95% accuracy on calls within 10cm of the line. That’s certainly better than human eye.
The NFL is already experimenting with something similar. During the 2024 preseason, the league used Hawk-Eye cameras to test a new way of measuring first downs. In short, once the ball was placed by the referees, the cameras would determine whether it was a first down. It launched to replace just one silly aspect of NFL refereeing—the chain measurement—but not the problem that appeared on Sunday with Josh Allen, which is more about where the ball should be placed.4
This is the part I think many NFL fans overlook when they say, ‘Well other sports have this technology.’ Tennis has the benefit of stationary lines, a binary outcome and basically no obstruction for camera sightlines. In football, it’s not just how far the ball got, but where it was the moment a knee, forearm, shin or butt touched the ground. That’s frequently under bodies, hidden from cameras and instant replay. Unlike a tennis court, the NFL boundaries are also 3D, not 2D.
To be clear, I readily welcome more technology for NFL first downs and ball placement. There is something comical about watching, in 2025, two people try to walk a straight line from opposite sidelines, meet in the middle, decide where to place the ball, then have the whole game hinge on a matter of centimeters.
And here’s how I know the NFL will do something about this, and soon: Some company is going to have to provide the technology for it, and that’s a sellable asset for the league. The Sony headsets worn by coaches? Those are part of a league-wide sponsorship deal. Same with the Microsoft tablets used on the sidelines. This electronic refereeing will be no different. Not only can the NFL take steps towards alleviating fan frustration, but it can get paid millions at the same time. Even if it’s not a silver bullet, it’s still gold.
Jacob’s ⚡ Take: If it’s too close to call, I think both teams should just get a do-over—and everyone should be reminded that sports are supposed to be fun, not forensics cases.
Programming Note: The Pick Six now comes in a separate post, in your inbox every Saturday AM.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
We even discussed it on the Sporticast this week.
I’m surprised I hadn’t internalized this fact (Jacob no doubt has written it many times). Sony bought Hawk-Eye in 2011.
It’s unclear if this tech at the Australian Open is actually Hawk-Eye. Some reporting says it is the Hawk-Eye Live service, others say it is company called Bolt6. Either way, it appears different from the previous Hawk-Eye tech, which was used for years only for player-initiated challenges of calls made by humans.