In the film “Any Given Sunday,” Al Pacino, portraying Coach Tony D’Amato, poignantly compares football to life, describing it as a “game of inches … one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast and you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us.” This razor-thin margin is what gives football its unique charm. Not every play is a Hail Mary; often, the game hinges on tense moments, such as the dreaded 4th and inches. Not all teams have mastered the tush push and some of these drives end with a pile of players on the ball. The poor referees are forced to sift through a pile of players to determine the ball’s location. Sometimes, referees resort to watching replays frame-by-frame to pinpoint the spot of the football. Even then, they’re not always correct. These decisions typically leave one group of fans jubilant and the other in dismay. In the midst of the debate over the ball’s placement, it might come as a surprise that the NFL tracks the location of each game ball in real time using an RFID tracking chip.

Since the 2017-18 season, the NFL has collaborated with Zebra Technologies and Wilson Sporting Goods to implant RFID chips within footballs to monitor the football’s position. Weighing only 3.3 grams, these inconspicuous chips are inserted between an inner air bladder and the outer leather shell of the football. Even the players wear RFID chips in their clothing, allowing teams to generate a postgame report with detailed analytics as to player movement. Behind the scenes, Zebra and Wilson are building a rich patent portfolio directed to positional-tracking technology. A look at Zebra’s patents provides a scouting report as to how the positional-tracking technology works.Continue Reading Tech Touchdowns: Revolutionizing Football with RFID Tracking