After this season, the league’s competition committee will take the data “and determine, if we do decide to shorten the distance between the uprights, what is the right distance, and where should it be to make it a more hard kick”, Dean Blandino, the NFL’s director of officiating, told Kryk in an interview.
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The league has clearly made an effort to make the kicking game tougher in recent years, including making extra points 33 yards, which drastically reduced their success rate. ESPN reports that the league has toyed with using chips for more accurate ball placement or when the ball crossed the goal line. The NFL notified all 32 teams of the changed not only because that just makes sense and they should, but also because quarterbacks wanted to make sure the footballs wouldn’t feel or act differently when thrown or handed off.
No matter what, any permanent change wouldn’t be made for the upcoming regular season, but the fact that the National Football League will definitely be looking at this stuff during preseason games means a change has a good chance of happening in the future.
The trackers, a microchip, will measure how easily kicks clear the uprights in order to determine if the league will choose to narrow the width of them.
“We’ll do some studies this year”, Blandino said.
The NFL’s newest experiment gives new meaning to the term chip-shot field goal.
The NFL performed spot checks on game balls for certain games during the 2015 season – that much we do know. But any rule changes wouldn’t take effect until after the 2017 season. But now it looks like we’ll have to start taking it a bit more literally, as in computer chips.
Life has already become trickier for kickers with the lengthened extra point that the league put into place last season, which led to a marked decrease in conversion rates. Do you like the idea of the goal posts being narrowed to make the game slightly more hard?
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“You never know”, Blandino added. The primary goal was to come up with a system to determine the precise location of the ball, to determine, say, if it broke the plane of the goal line or if a first down was attained.
