Source: Warren Little / Getty
The NFL has a new experiment… they want to insert a microchip into the a league approved football kicking ball this preseason.
Dean Blandino, the NFL’s senior vice president of officiating, told the Toronto Sun’s John Kryk reports that the data that will be obtained from the microchips will be analyzed by their competition committee after the season.
This will determine how the goal post can be “reasonably manipulated to make kicks more challenging.”
That’s what they said, more challenging. And they said that if this initial experiment goes well, that they might continue to do it during the regular season’s Thursday night football games.
They said that for years the NFL has looks into the possible idea of a “smart football,” one that would have miniature GPS units and accelerometers inside.
Those GPS units would help to determine the “price location of the footballs” and it would help with things like ball speed, spin and trajectory too.
“You can’t change the weight, the spiral and the torque or the feel of the football,” Prya Narasimhan, then an associate professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, told the Times in 2011.
“It’s really critically important, otherwise you’ve just ruined the whole purpose.”
Priya’s engineering team and her students were among the people who worked on the chip-equipped footballs. Their goal was to learn the balls precise location and if the ball broke the plane of the goal line or was sit a first down.
The NFL wants to use the microchip balls or laser technology to measure first down, but would mean no chain gang coming on the field to measure it out.
What do you think, is this taking away from the game or adding to it?
Via:latimes
