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A professor at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania is trying to improve the accuracy of officiating football according to Wired News.

Dr. Priya Narasimhan believes through GPS and an accelerometer she can electronically measure the position of the football within millimeters of the yard line where the ball is down. If successful, this could eliminate the need to bring out the measurement chains and prevent many reviews under the hood by the referees. It could be one less reason to throw that challenge flag.

The technology may also enable live data on ball handling grips, trajectories, speed, and ball cradling. Special gloves are embedded with 15 wireless touch sensors that can measure correct hand positioning on the ball. A GPS chip inside the football sends data every second which is accurate up to 30 feet.

Dr. Narasimhan’s engineering team is just in the beginning stages of development and they will likely have improvements to make as they go along. They hope to eventually utilize this technology in the NFL.

On the field and off the field, this technology could revolutionize football. It could improve training on the practice field performance on game day. You can only imagine how much time this would save during a game. The fumbles can be a tough decision. With 15 players stacked up, no official can see when the ball came out, if the player was down before the ball came out, and who recovered it.

Some could argue that our current rules of football lack technology to the extent that nearly half of the ref call should be unofficial. On the other hand, it often appears there is some favoritism playing into some of these decisions. If a tracking device can improve accuracy and help enforce the rules, I think the implementation of this technology is in everyone’s best interest.