The most dramatic moment in many football games is frankly absurd.
The offense has just gambled and gone for it on fourth down, and gotten very close to the first down line. The defense thinks they’ve come up with the stop, which would result in a turnover on downs.
The referee picks up the ball and makes a rough guess of where to spot it. Then he blows the whistle.
It’s at that moment that three assistant referees pick up the first down chains on the sideline and trot out onto the field (in perfectly straight lines, of course, to preserve the integrity of the measurement).
Tension fills the air as the bumbling zebra-shirts finally arrive at the football in the middle of the field. They stretch out the chains as both teams flail their arms to indicate that possession should be theirs. The first down marker either extends beyond the nose of the ball (no first down) or is still touching the ball (first down), and one team celebrates, oftentimes having clinched the win thanks to the result of this measurement.
This enormously consequential episode in a football game is ridiculous for so many reasons, starting with the way the chains are brought out onto the field. The front marker is carried sideways, causing the chain to sag in the middle, so another ref (in addition to the one holding the back marker) is charged with holding it up. By the time the three of them get out to the ball, it’s hard to imagine that they’ve maintained the exact location of the first down marker down to a millimeter as would be necessary to get this call right.
Let’s say that the refs defy the odds and perfectly carry out the chains to the ball. The measurement is somehow still an inexact science once the chains are out on the field with the ball, as the referees can still have a hard time determining whether the ball has reached the first down line (NFL referee Gene Steratore infamously once tried to see if he could stick an index card between the ball and the first down marker to see if there was space between them).
On the flip side, many first down measurements occur when the result of the measurement is blatantly obvious to everyone watching the game. The ball is often clearly between two hash marks when the referees decide to shimmy out with the chains and dramatically discover that the first down line was gained when everyone else in the stadium knew that 10 minutes earlier.
The biggest issue, though, is the spot of the ball by the referee. If there’s anything we should be stopping the game for in this situation, it’s to watch the replay and see where the ball should be placed.
How is it possible that in this age of replay we don’t usually bother to spot the ball correctly, instead making an educated guess and then bringing out the sticks for the dramatic first down reveal? (Also, how do we not have a magic line like the rough yellow one on TV that can just tell us whether it’s a first down and save the refs the trouble of measuring for themselves?)
In general, I’m a believer that football is one of the most fair major sports. The better team that day is usually the one that wins.
But both the optics and subjectivity of first down measurements are plainly embarrassing for football as a sport. We have more replay technology than ever before, and yet for some reason we continue this ridiculous and imprecise ritual that turns one of a football game’s climactic and deciding moments into a guessing game and a joke.
Photo courtesy of Ted Kerwin/Flickr
