New era dawns Inside NFL command center on opening night

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New era dawns: Inside NFL command center on opening night   Published: Sep 11, 2019 at 09:01 AM           Senior National Columnist                              NEW YORK -- It was a few minutes before kickoff of the NFL season last Thursday night, and the dimly-lit room described as the "brain" of a game day smelled like coffee.      Al Riveron, who would spend the next three hours standing, sitting, pacing, talking and monitoring infractions small (did that guy run out of bounds and then come back in?) to historic (the first coach's challenge of a pa s interference non-call in the regular season), was first presiding over the room's designated snack area, pre sing Caf Dwight Howard Jersey  Bustelo into a Cuban coffee machine. was about to take the field when Riveron placed a cup -- real china, from the two sets he keeps here -- in front of Dawn Aponte, the league's chief football administrative officer, and the season was on.     Riveron has good reason to act as the host. The is the home base of officiating and he is the league's head of officiating. When game announcers say a call is being reviewed in New York, they are talking about this place, a hub of high-definition monitors and headphones at which every game is closely watched. It was Riveron's call when coach Matt LaFleur challenged a non-call of offensive pa s interference in the fourth quarter against the (the non-call on the field was upheld -- no flag was thrown) just as it was Riveron's call to allow a staffer to bring his dog when families gathered here while the officiating department was working the games one year.     Officiating has come under withering scrutiny for years, and their jobs have grown more complex as players have gotten faster and the rules more byzantine. The confluence of high-definition, extremely slow-motion replays available to every viewer with a television or phone and the multiplying effect of social media has elevated what used to be an occasional bad call that would be forgotten in a few hours into full-blown crises that dominate the sports conversation for days.     This season, the league will increasingly do what television networks began doing nearly a decade ago: train a lens on officiating by offering real-time analysis of high profile or complicated calls. The idea behind the league's plan, of course, is not to pile on the scrutiny, but to enlighten fans about how decisions were made, and perhaps to diffuse potential controversies before they gain traction.      "It's what we sign up for," Riveron says of the often critical analysis. "Technology is only going to get better. We have experts on TV that di sect everything we do. At the end, it makes us better. We have to embrace technology even though it picks up things that the human eye might not pick up. Yes, the scrutiny is there, but we have to get better. This game is getting better and if we don't perform at an extremely high level, then the game doesn't go well."     So, barely noticeable, a small camera is mounted on a partition in the officiating lair at the NFL's Park Avenue headquarters, and Riveron's mark on the floor is denoted with a small piece of tape, just a few steps from where he stands at the head of an oblong table to see the games. From that spot, the quick hits -- maybe 10 to 15 seconds long -- Riveron delivers for  James Worthy Jersey the department's Twitter feed ( ) will pull back the curtain a bit on a complex and often confounding element of the game.        "Many have asked why has it taken us  Wilt Chamberlain Jersey so long," said Troy Vincent, the NFL's chief football officer, who oversees the officiating department.     What are they hoping to accomplish? "Just further education, being a little more consistent, not letting something boil to a point where it takes on its own life and it shouldn't," Vincent said. "We should be able to answer that question in the 1 p.m. (ET) window and not wait four or five or six hours later to put out an explanation of why a call was a certain way and why something happened."         The operation is not entirely new. The NFL has provided explanations on television and in videos distributed to media in the last few seasons. And officials still talk to pool reporters after games when nece sary, as Riveron did following at the end of the first half of the Texans- game Monday night.      But this expanded and more immediate and direct contact with fans feels, inevitably, like a response to the extended firestorm that followed the in the NFC Championship Game last season, which engulfed the entire bye week leading up to the .     Not so, Vincent said. The NFL had already been contemplating providing more rapid-fire explanations.     "It's nece sary for officiating," Vincent said. "It's nece sary for the National Football League."     It might be most nece sary for the credibility of officials, whose jobs were seemingly made even more difficult this offseason, when, in response to the NFC Championship Game blunder, team owners voted to , one of the biggest and most fraught penalties in the game.        The demands on officials are well-known to the NFL's , which spends a lot of time worrying about the ever-expanding complexity of the rule book and the unintended consequences new rules create. Until 2014, replay reviews were conducted completely on the field without consultation with the league office. Not until 2017 did authority to make the final decision on reviews shift to New York, in the hopes of making the calls more quickly and making the judgments more consistent. Riveron became an NFL on-field official  Lonzo Ball Jersey in 2004 and a referee in 2008 so he knows well the strains on officials.     "You can't blink," he said. "For seven or eight seconds, you blink and you mi s it. If you stand back there and blink twice, you will mi s that pa s or fumble. You don't know if it's a pa s or fumble. You have to stay focused for 3 1/2 hours. A lot of our guys and gals don't come off the field physically exhausted but mentally, you're drained. If you don't come off the field mentally drained, you haven't performed your job."     INSIDE THE COMMAND CENTER: 'Even with all the technology, there's imperfection'     It is surprisingly quiet inside GameDay Central on the first Thursday evening of the season. With only one game being played, there are only a dozen or so people here, including the technician sitting at his 58-inch monitor, which can be divided into multiple camera angles. That allows Riveron and the technician to punch up the one that gives Riveron the best view of the play in question. Even this technology has its limits, though. Riveron only has acce s to the same camera angles the networks have for television. He can't see in-stadium feeds or coaches' tapes. What he sees is the same as what a fan sitting on his or her sofa can see. That means when networks deploy extra cameras for the biggest games, Riveron has more camera shots to peruse before he makes a call.     On a Sunday, this place is jammed, with a technician a signed to each game sitting at his own station and with as many as seven people -- members of the football operations, technology and communications staffs among them -- seated around a huge table that faces the room's dominant feature: three 98-inch, 4K definition televisions, each of which can be divided into four screens. During the early games on a Sunday, those screens can show as many as 12 games at once.     "Even with all the technology, there's imperfection," Vincent said. "There's humans involved and yet we look and seek perfection, oftentimes we fall short of that even in this environment. We're sterile, the latest and greatest technology, we think we can see everything, and sometimes we fall short. We have everything and we still fall short."     There are so many people involved in managing the details of football operations on a Sunday that they occupy four rooms -- a collective command center that Vincent said is the real brain of the NFL. Stephanie Durante, a game operations executive, is in touch with practically everyone at every game site, monitoring, among other things, security threats and the weather, in case lightning forces game operations to order the stands evacuated. Vincent spends Sundays with another staffer next to him, flagging plays for instructional videos -- for officials, for coaches to show what plays and techniques the NFL wants out of the game and for coaches to show what the league likes. He doesn't go to GameDay Central  Marc Gasol Jersey until it is time for th
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