This week, the NFL announced that in the 2025 season they will use a digital measurement system to conduct chain measurements instead of bringing the chains onto the field. This change is expected to cut over half of the time required for a measurement.
Measuring the chains is an activity that is both highly reliable and accurate, and typically pointless. Football was historically played on many irregular fields where the slope of the playing surface is inconsistent, where the field is mixed-use and may have a baseball infield overlaid with it. There are also cases where the yard lines are very poorly marked and have nearly faded, or where the markings are irregular (officials joke about the number of beers that certain ground crews had consumed before they began work). It is a standard practice at all levels of football for officials to inspect the field before the contest to verify all lines and prepare solutions to the problems that may appear. When working a football game on an irregular field, officials frequently need to use measurements because the field itself does not readily allow the officials to square the line with any degree of accuracy. However while these historic reasons to need measurements were real, the rise of turf fields, single use fields, separate practice fields, and automatic field painting systems has made these problems rare at the high school level, virtually non-existent at the college level, and extinct at the professional level.
There are other reasons why measurements have been unnecessary. In football, the short wing officials spot the ball (determine where it went down). They are on the sideline doing this and after determining their spot they move into the field. Short wings are required to spot the ball for first down on the nearest full yard line in the vast majority of circumstances (really anything except a turnover on downs, a first down inside the five, and potentially a short conversion near but short of the ten yard line. They have perfect views of the individualized yard markers right inside the field of play, and are responsible for always knowing where the line to gain is in relation to those lines. As a matter of necessity, before they have finished indicating where the ball became dead, the short wing knows if they spotted the ball short of the line to gain or not (all of this assuming the field is regular as discussed above).
So why did measurements still exist until now? Because many NFL officials began officiating forty plus years ago, because coaches grasp desperately at straws, and because a chain measurement is a performance that some officials like to perform. At the lowest levels of play, chain measurements are frequently used to test out new officials and see which ones have read and memorized their entire mechanics manuals. At higher levels of play, its only function is as an unearned timeout or an act of pure theater. I know of many referees who believe that every game should have exactly one measurement, and successfully manage to find a situation in each game to justify measuring.
The NFL deciding to replace it with a digital system is not going to actually change things. Hypothetically, the faster reviews could lead to more measurements. However, considering how chain measurements are primarily performances, I expect that what will actually happen is vastly fewer chain measurements. The exciting thing is that integrating this technology into the game will potentially make it more likely that other assistance technologies will be developed and deployed in the near future.
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