Did Josh Allen get the first down?
You know the play. 4th & 1, early-fourth-quarter, a QB sneak at a crucial moment in the AFC championship game between the Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs.
A lot of people have said yes, Allen did get the first down, and a lot of people have said no, also. One of the line judges had the ball spotted over the line to gain, and the other line judge had it marked short.
NFL on CBS commentators Tony Romo and Jim Nantz, as well as CBS rules analyst Gene Steratore, believed it was a first down. But, the ball was marked short, and there wasn’t a good enough camera angle to overturn the call on the field given the mass pile of bodies around the ball on the QB sneak.
The call marking Allen short of the sticks sent NFL fans into a frenzy. It didn’t help that the Chiefs had already been under a microscope because they benefitted from a couple of questionable calls against the Houston Texans the week prior in the divisional round.
The call by the refs that marked the Bills short has sparked not only controversy but also a reason to look into better ways of measuring first downs. Since the beginning of the NFL, it’s been a chain gang manually moving the first down markers and line judges doing their best to spot the ball where it was when the play was blown dead.
When the location of the point of the ball ultimately will decide who gets a trip to the Super Bowl, you want that spot to be as accurate as possible. Obviously, with it coming down to the eyes of an official moving laterally along the sideline, it’s easy to be off by a couple of inches.
This is where technology could come into play in the future, even as early as next season.
“The NFL will consider implementing an electronic system for measuring first downs during the 2025 season,” said Mark Maske of the Washington Post.”
The system currently under talks of potentially coming into play would involve the ball being spotted manually by officials before the electronic system determines if the spot of the ball is a first down. Some have suggested that electronic chips be placed into the balls to determine exactly where the ball was down, but that wouldn’t come into play here.
The NFL was experimenting with electronic first-down measuring in the 2024 preseason.
“Most likely we’ll continue the testing of that probably in more venues next preseason, just like we did this year,” said Walt Anderson, the NFL’s officiating rules analyst and club communications liaison, in August. “With the intent that at some point, assuming it can be tested and we get good returns on [that] testing, that we can implement that possibly for the ’25 season. That’ll end up being a decision that the competition committee addresses next spring and that [the team owners end] up entertaining for next preseason.”
As far as the testing itself went in the 2024 preseason, some of it was positive and some of it presented challenges.
“You certainly had some of them that went very smoothly,” said Anderson. “And then we had others where obviously there were some challenges. All of that is part of the learning curve. We’ll end up continuing to collect data [on] that. It’ll be a topic for the competition committee in the spring.”
