NFL first-down measurements are now digital, as America’s biggest sport turns to technology and away from old-school chains.

The chain gang will forever be sidelined, it seems. Though, they’ll still be on the sideline in 2025.

The league will use Sony Hawk-Eye Technology to spot the footballs full time after using it in preseason last year.

NFL first-down measurements are now digital, should be more accurate

The NFL has long been a league ready to adjust with the times.

Recent years have seen an emphasis on safety, leading to the Dynamic Kickoff and other changes.

We’ve also seen the expedited replay come into use as of 2024. The league office, with an eye on all games being played, is now able to make snap judgements to help on-field officials. That’s been widely enjoyed by fans and commentators alike because it speeds up the pace of play and gets calls right more often.

This year, the NFL first-down measurements are now digital per Sportico.

The league experimented with the Sony Hawk-Eye Technology–which has been used in professional tennis and the NBA–last year during the preseason. Now, they’re ready to take it full-time.

Sony uses six cameras with 8K resolution mounted around NFL stadiums to determine the location of the ball in relation to the line to gain. It should be noted that human officials will still mark the ball at the conclusion of plays.

And when the ball is near a first down–or close enough a coach asks for a measurement–this new technology will determine if the line was gained or not.

Not only does the new system promise to be more accurate than the chain gang, it’ll be faster, too. In the 2024 preseason, Hawk-Eye measurements took 30 seconds on average compared to 75 seconds with the chains per Sportico.

The chain gang will remain on the sidelines in 2025 as a backup to the cameras.

Hawk-Eye Technology won’t solve close plays in a scrum

The cameras can quickly tell whether or not a ball, once spotted by an official, has reached the line to gain.

But this new tech won’t help on plays like Josh Allen’s 4th-and-1 run against the Chiefs in the AFC Championship Game.

That’s because the cameras can tell the location of the ball within a few millimeters, but that data would have to be married with when the player is down. It’s too difficult to see when a player’s bodypart has touched the ground in relation to the location of the ball.

Some point to the RFID microchips which have been inside NFL footballs since 2017.

Could the microchips and the Hawk-Eye cameras work in concert with one another for a play like Allen’s run in a scrum of players? Or similar plays on the goal line where both teams create chaos of body parts and obstructed views.

It’s possible.

But the RFID chips aren’t accurate enough to do so.

According to Henry Bushnell of Yahoo! Sports, there’s a margin of error of six inches with the microchips in the footballs.

Considering the NFL football is 11 inches long, that seems to suggest the microchips are in the dead-center of the ball. Could the NFL put one chip on either end of the pigskin?

Either way, six inches as a margin of error is way too much in football, a literal game of inches.