Ch-Ch-Changes

Humans are a curious lot. Kind and cruel, generous and selfish, adventurous and timid, welcoming and intolerant, yin and yang. Complex creatures. Or, less charitably, contradictions with feet. We are wonderfully adaptive yet often averse to change unless it benefits us directly, in society and even in our diversions. 

Get me a fat guy with a chain, he said

The start of football season provides a small reminder that some practices die hard and persist for no good reason. The technology exists to measure the length of golf shots to the inch, to separate race finishers by thousandths of a second, to call balls and strikes consistently, to determine whether an attacker’s shoulder was behind a defender when a pass was struck for offside in soccer. Yet for a couple of its elemental components, football still relies on a field official eyeballing ball placement and two fat guys carrying a ten-yard length of chain attached to two poles. 

Seems less than ideal and a mite archaic, witness Afghan villagers who say, “Chain? Poles? Dibs on that.” It's not as if football is stuck in the 1950s. We’ve had replay for years and slo-mo, hi-def looks at whether a receiver got his feet in bounds and if a ball carrier’s knee touched the ground before he fumbled. The NFL has computer tablets with in-game pics and printouts on the sidelines and in-helmet communication on the field. Third-down and long-yardage tendencies are available with a few clicks. Sensors and miniature mobile devices, wearable technology, track speed and performance and bodily functions. Training and recovery practices are well beyond cold and hot tubs. The league has finally come around to concussion concerns, albeit slowly and reluctantly. But two of the game’s fundamental features – Where should the ball be placed? Did the offense advance ten yards? – are decided pretty much identically to how it was done seventy years ago. 

It’s a little like doctors embracing the medical innovation and equipment of recent years yet still falling back on rectal thermometers [NOTE: That's the example you chose?] and bloodletting. Granted, coaches may challenge the spot of the ball, just as they can fumbles and receptions and incompletions. It shouldn’t come to that. 

For something as basic as ball placement, there should be as little ambiguity as possible. The field official should have an earpiece with a direct line of communication to Command Central, with all its TV monitors and angles and replays. When he spots the ball after a play, the person at HQ gives a thumbs-up if he got it right, or if he didn’t: “Not there. Move it back a foot.” Ninety percent of the time those calls aren’t critical, since most plays conclude well short of or well past the ten-yard threshold. But on third- and fourth-down plays, and inches short or inches converted, exactitude is of some importance. When HQ determines where the ball should be spotted on first down, it also knows precisely where ten yards downfield is. It isn’t left to a guy trying to get the spot right among tangled bodies and high emotions, and then a couple guys schlepping the chain across the field trying to measure accurately. 

Yes, a bit of drama is lost when fans don’t get to see the chain stretched out on the Jumbotron or on the flatscreen at home signifying that a team did or didn’t make a first down. Do you want a moment of theater, or do you want to get it right? The potential criticism that giving ball spots and contested third- and fourth-down conversions to “the booth” or HQ will further disrupt game flow doesn’t exactly hold water. Football is already chopped up like an elementary school music recital – usually six or seven seconds of action followed by 30 seconds of huddles and substitutions, never mind the TV commercial breaks, replay reviews, injury interruptions and Tom Brady hawking diet supplements and self-improvement programs. 

The NFL gets into the weeds all the time with peripheral stuff. Spare us tweaked kickoff formations and altered overtime rules for postseason and mind-numbing explanations about “When is a catch a catch?” and “Did he complete a football play?” Address the basics and let the players take care of the rest. That and maybe Jerry Jones in a dunking booth during Super Bowl Week – something both optimists and grumps could get behind.