NFL Teams will be using Microsoft Surface tablets on the sidelines

They will be provided by the league, teams will not have access to them during the week. They will have realtime, color overhead shots of the previous series, replacing the old black and white fax copies that QBs and coaches used to go through in between series.



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But some of the details of the Surface deal seemed a little strange. As Businessweek reported, the tablets are owned by the NFL, not the teams, and are only going to be used during games, not during the rest of the week. If you watched any NFL football last year, you must have noticed an abundance of Surface ads. So is this deal just a marketing move to get more Surface tablets in front of TV viewers?

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"The existing systems are a fax machine on each sideline. The quarterback comes to the sideline, puts his helmet down, and 20 to 30 secs later somebody hands him
piece of paper with the last series of plays. It's a black and white image, just pre-snap, of each series," explained Luckin.

But in cases of a quick change of possession, the quarterback may not get time to view the images before being called back on to the field. Plus, the images aren't great quality.

With the Surface tablets -- which are Surface Pro 2s, by the way -- the images are full color, and appear nearly in real time. Coaches can also annotate them with a stylus, as they do with whiteboards.

Luckin also explained that the ownership by the NFL was to ensure that teams didn't try and get an extra advantage by installing other apps which would take off-field information and use it on the field, or by tweeting images from the sidelines. "The NFL wants to control way they're being used. It's not meant to be a social media device."

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