Baseball was Al Michaels’ “first love” from the beginning anyway. Before becoming synonymous with NFL broadcasts, Michaels called minor league games in Hawaii, spent years with the Reds and Giants, and eventually built a career that took him all the way to Cooperstown. Decades removed from calling the sport regularly, Michaels still occasionally finds himself returning to baseball, especially when something in front of him gives him a reason to make the comparison. Thursday night was one of those moments.

During the Patriots’ preseason clash with the Browns, a fourth-and-one measurement triggered the NFL’s new virtual first-down technology. The extended pause didn’t sit well with the veteran broadcaster. And so…

“Here’s the virtual measurement. It works great in baseball,” Michaels said. “I love it in baseball. Baseball takes about two seconds. And we’re still waiting. Come on now. It’s okay that you want a virtual measurement, but let’s make it happen, folks.”
For Michaels, though, the baseball comparison was about more than simply using cameras to settle a call.

Michaels had called a 4th-and-1 soon after the play. But the system took time, and as the replays rolled, he kept the commentary going, clearly amused by the whole situation. “I’m trying to find anyone who has any clue what’s going on here,” he said.

And once the ruling finally came in, Michaels was even less impressed. “We saw it. We could’ve done three commercials,” he said. “Short by what? By two feet, three inches, and that calls for a virtual measurement?! Okeeeee.”

This isn’t the first time the technology has drawn attention. It actually made its debut last year during the Hall of Fame Game between the Chargers and Lions, marking a shift for the league. In April that year, the NFL confirmed it was moving away from the old-fashioned chain crew as its primary measurement method and handing measurement duties to Sony’s Hawk-Eye system instead. But Michaels was comparing two very different uses of the same technology.

In baseball, Hawk-Eye is already tracking every pitch in the background. Under MLB’s Automated Ball-Strike challenge system, a player challenges a call and the existing tracking data can be sent to the stadium and broadcast almost immediately. MLB’s spring training challenges averaged 13.8 seconds from start to finish, so Michaels’ “two seconds” was clearly rhetorical, but the experience is still far quicker than the kind of extended wait he encountered Thursday night. Plus, the NFL has more to do before Hawk-Eye can deliver its answer.

Officials must first determine where a play ended and spot the football. Only then can the system measure that human-established spot against the line to gain. The result then has to be processed, confirmed and communicated to the game officials and broadcast. In other words, Hawk-Eye doesn’t decide where the football should be spotted; it only determines whether the spot the officials have already chosen is enough for a first down.

That’s why Michaels’ frustration was really aimed at the process surrounding the technology, not necessarily Hawk-Eye itself. Baseball can pull up the result of an event it has already been tracking. Football still has several steps to get through before its measurement can begin.

Speed was the whole idea here. Not necessarily an instantaneous answer, the NFL has said the full virtual measurement process is expected to take around 30 seconds, but a faster one than the old chain procedure, which could take roughly 70 to 75 seconds. The league introduced the virtual system to cut that dead time while also making the final measurement more precise.

According to the league’s own testing, the new system trims the process down to around 30 seconds, potentially saving up to 40 seconds compared with a manual measurement. Six 8K cameras, installed along one side of each NFL stadium, optically track the ball’s position. The measurement is then processed through the NFL’s central officiating operation in New York before the result reaches the game.

The system debuted in the regular season last year in the Denver Broncos vs Tennessee Titans game. Quarterback Bo Nix tried sneaking it in on fourth and one and got stuffed almost immediately. Instead of the usual chain measurement, the league deployed the virtual system. The result: Nix was ruled 10 inches short.

However, there are limits to the technology. It will only determine if an offense gets a first down; ball spotting has to be done by the on-field crew. That distinction has become one of the system’s biggest sticking points. A virtual measurement can be extremely precise, but it cannot correct an inaccurate initial spot. If officials place the ball incorrectly, Hawk-Eye will simply measure precisely from that spot.

Sony President and COO Neal Manowitz also said “the system is accurate down to less than half an inch.”

The NFL is also keeping the traditional chain crew around as a backup. Weather, connectivity problems or other unforeseen circumstances can still interfere with an optical tracking system. Sony’s Hawk-Eye has tested the technology in difficult conditions, including fog and snow, and the league has acknowledged that cameras can only track what they can see. Snow on the field itself is less of a problem because the fields are digitally calibrated; snowfall covering a camera lens is the bigger concern.

The delay in the Patriots-Browns game isn’t the first of its kind. Last year, the Miami Dolphins and the Detroit Lions faced a similar delay after the virtual measurement system was triggered on a third-and-one run by the Dolphins. According to Pro Football Talk’s Michael David Smith, there was a significant delay, long enough that the new technology did not appear to save much time over bringing out the chains.

YouTube’s Sunday Ticket stream also briefly displayed a technical-difficulties screen during that stretch, although there was never any confirmation that the streaming issue was connected to the virtual measurement delay.

The league had already recognized another problem: even when virtual measurement is technically faster, it can feel slower when viewers have no idea what is happening.

Walt Anderson said the NFL had been working with its broadcast partners to make sure there was “something going on whenever people are watching the TV.” That may be as much a presentation problem as a technology problem. Thirty seconds can pass quickly when viewers can see a process unfolding. It feels much longer when the field is frozen and the booth is left guessing.

There is another potential future direction, although it is not ready to replace the current system. NFL footballs already contain tracking chips used for analytics such as speed and distance, but those chips are not accurate enough for officiating-level first-down decisions. More importantly, even a perfectly located football would not tell a computer exactly when a runner was down or where forward progress stopped. Sony’s Hawk-Eye representatives have nevertheless said there have been discussions about whether future technology could help with those “precursor steps” before measurement, including the far more difficult problem of ball spotting.

For now, that is the irony behind Michaels’ complaint. The NFL introduced Hawk-Eye to make one of football’s oldest procedures faster and more efficient. The NFL’s own target is roughly 30 seconds, and the league has continued refining both the operational process and how it is presented on television. But because football’s system still depends on human spotting, central processing and communication before the virtual line can appear, the technology comes with more steps than its baseball counterpart.