We Salute You

While out to dinner the other night ago, my lady's roommate was talking about the "yellow line" on the football field during the games that marked the first down line. She said that when she was younger she did not know where it came from, or how it worked, because it just came out of nowhere.

The next day I ran into an article regarding the yellow line and realized she was completely right. It did come out of nowhere.

From the article:

The system was first introduced in an ESPN Sunday night football game in the fall of '98. It wasn't announced ahead of time. When we did the hockey puck, it had been announced by Fox as 'the greatest innovation in the history of mankind.' And of course people thought, 'What about the wheel?'
The first-down line just went on the air. There was no pre-announcement at all. It really did look like it was just yellow chalk on the glass. The journalists were absolutely stunned, saying, 'How the heck did they do that?' They were wondering 'Do they vacuum it up when they're done?' In the beginning it would take a 50-foot truck full of computers to do it. Now it's down to a box of equipment the size of an apartment refrigerator.

Stan Honey, the person who developed the "yellow strip," describes how it works:

The way it works is that we have accurate sensors on all the cameras so we're able to measure the pan, tilt, zoom, focus of each of the broadcast cameras. If you go to a sporting event and look below every camera you'll see a gold box that has the Sportvision logo on it. That's the sensor. We also characterize the distortion of the lens and we have to measure the crown of the field. We know where the first-down line is because that is entered by an operator. Given all that information, we compute where that line should appear. The electronic yard line has to lie perfectly parallel to all the regular yard lines to preserve the illusion that it's on the grass.

The dude should get lifetime tickets to every football game in America and free Pabst Blue Ribbon.

I salute you Stan Honey, and so does the rest of the football world.