Posted on: Monday, January 10, 2005
ABOUT MEN
The Yellow Line scores, big time
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By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer
At last, my wife has finally found something in football that interests her: The Yellow Line.
I've been watching football with my wife for almost 25 years, for as long as we've been married. In all that time, I've never known her to stay in the same room with a televised football game for more than a few minutes.
Or at least that was true until she discovered The Yellow Line, the innovation of a few years back that appears on the TV screen — but not on the actual football field — to mark where a team has to go to make a first down.
"What's that?" my wife asked as she was leaving the room one Sunday morning.
"It's The Yellow Line," I told her.
"Where did it come from? How do they do it? How come the players don't step on it?"
Of course, I didn't have the answer. I could tell her just about anything she wanted to know about the real game of football, but the line just appeared one day, became popular, and within a few months was ubiquitous without anyone really questioning where it came from.
After a few games, it seemed like it was always there, like the bowl of potato chips I keep next to the remote control during football season. Now, 92 percent of all football fans say they want the line in every game they watch. The Yellow Line even won its own Emmy a couple of years ago.
"How do they make The Yellow Line?" my wife asked a few of the guys who were over at the house to drink beer and watch a UH game one Saturday night.
"They use computers," said Big Steve, who watches more TV and knows more about computers than anybody I know.
My wife hit him with one of those looks.
"But how?" she said. Not even Big Steve knew.
So when halftime came, we all moved into the computer room, called up Ask Jeeves
.com (www.ask.com) and punched in a question: "How do they make that Yellow Line on TV football games?"
The answer came back instantly, full of words like real time, pixels, 3-D model, encoders, pans, tilts, zooms, focus, extenders, geometrical calculations, 30-times-a-second scans, consolidated data streams, color palettes and virtual first downs.
"See, they do it with computers," Big Steve said.
At which point, we all decided to go to a Mexican restaurant to drink margaritas and watch the second half, except my wife, who stayed home to read a book.
Recently, Sportsvision, the folks who brought us the Yellow Line technology, have added blue lines (for the line of scrimmage), red lines (for the red zone, of course) and even multicolored lines advertising upcoming TV shows.
I still don't understand how all those lines work, but at least now my wife and I have something in common to think about on Sunday mornings in the fall.
Reach Mike Leidemann at mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-5460.
