The league will use the high-tech footballs during the 2016 preseason and Thursday night regular-season games. One Chip to find them.
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It’s in an effort to gather data about field goals that could eventually lead to the league narrowing field goal posts, something that’s sure to drive kickers even more insane.
To be more specific, all balls kicked at the uprights will be created to measure exactly how closely successful kicks come to the posts. The Sun reports that the league will also use chip-equipped kick balls on Thursday night games during the season if the data collected in the preseason is useful.
For now, the data collected from the footballs is part of what the league calls the “next phase of the Next Gen Stats player tracking project”, which began back in 2014, when the NFL began placing tracking chips on players to measure such things as velocity and body position.
“We’ll see what the data tells us”, Blandino said. This did reduce the number of successful field goals, however, professional football teams still managed to maintain high numbers of total season field conversions. Initially, the chips will be placed in K-balls, a.k.a. the balls that kickers use.
“You never know”, Blandino told Kryk.
Blandino said that after the season, they’ll analyze the data and determine if / what changes will be made to make kicks more hard.
If the National Football League does narrow the uprights, that will undoubtedly affect the conversion rate of not only field goal attempts, but extra points. The [Competition Committee] will discuss it and then make a recommendation for 2017 if they feel that we need to go that route.
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Now that the NFL’s last football-related story is (hopefully) over after hundreds of days and millions of dollars in attorney fees, the league can move on to something else: Namely, putting computer chips in the footballs to help determine if the uprights needed to be narrower. If the football data chips reveal that the vast majority of field goal kicks would have scored regardless of narrowed goal posts, it’s likely the NFL will make no changes to the field goals.
