I know that at present you couldn’t remove all human officiating but I personally support some upgrades.
For example, sensors in the ball and on the field that give perfect ball placement every time. Particularly at the goal line.
God yes. I’ve already posted about this in a comment somewhere else, but AI right now should be able to COMPLETELY fix
- Delay of game
- Encroachment / Offsides
- False Start
- Illegal Motions
- Illegal Formations
- Too many men on defense / offense
- Illegal Shift
- Illegal Substitution
- Illegal touch / player out of bounds
- Ineligible man downfield
- Intentional Grounding
- Sideline Infractions (ahem, MIKE TOMLIN)
This isn’t remotely all the penalties in football, and there are still tons that I think would be very hard for CV/AI to tackle right now (holding, taunting, etc.) that are wildly subjective calls, but if we can knock off all of the above penalties as things that referees no longer have to worry about, then perhaps it frees up more bandwidth to spend on the more subjective calls.
Obviously, as AI and computer vision develop, other things can be added in, and I still think there’s a need for humans on the field in officiating, but every year it seems like officiating gets worse.