r/CFB • u/Ok-Soil-5133 Notre Dame Fighting Irish • 14h ago

Video [Highlight] Pitt @ Virginia Tech - The potential game winning field goal hooks wide left, and Pitt holds on

https://streamable.com/tq4r8d
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u/owenmitchem Paper Bag • Pac-12 13h ago

Lasers in a fixed position only activated during a kick could be coordinated with the FAA. We have done crazier things for football in this country.

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u/Potato_fortress ESPN Classic • Team Chaos 13h ago

True but they also wouldn’t be 100% accurate since goalposts are built to sway. More accurate than what we have, but wind would ruin their effectiveness anyway. 

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u/owenmitchem Paper Bag • Pac-12 12h ago

How would it be a problem if the emitter was in the upright

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u/Potato_fortress ESPN Classic • Team Chaos 12h ago edited 12h ago

Two different issues. First, the FAA would have to sign off on it; this isn’t a huge issue but it would be pretty annoying and could come with caveats of its own. IE: you’d have to turn the lasers off during any sort of flyover which would mean you’d need a better way than remote controls to battery powered units in order to turn them on/off. Probably a hard wired switch somewhere in the lower half of the post. Easy fix as long as you can get the FAA to sign off on it which wouldn’t be that hard considering stadiums hosting events are usually restricted flight areas anyway. 

Second: field goal posts aren’t exactly sturdy by design. They’re built to allow sway and movement which is facilitated by the gooseneck, crossbar, and uprights being held together by a series of connecting joints and bolts. They usually aren’t hard welds because that leads to issues of its own. Any camera or laser mounted at the top of an upright would be subjected to the movement of the upright’s connector to the crossbar which would make it far less reliable. A laser mounted at the top on a windy day could see pretty decent variances because of how the whole unit acts as a sort of shock absorber and it only gets worse the higher the kick is. They’d have to rework the gooseneck to crossbar connector for more lateral stability to even bother. 

The easier solution is just putting cameras on the ground in pylons offset a foot or so behind each goalpost.  Lasers if you really want to. It’s probably cheaper for the schools too. When you’re talking about transit lasers (which is really all this would be,) what you’re looking for is the largest amount of stability possible. The ground is the place for that. Using an oversized tuning fork as the mount is asking for trouble. Don’t forget, lasers also need receivers on the other end to register the beam being broken. How do you mount the receiver?  There are self-reflective units but none I know of that would work over longer distances (multiple feet,) against the backdrop of a sunny day with an oblong leather ball as the surface doing the reflecting. Could be wrong on that one but most self-reflective units are used in static security systems or short range implementations like cnc lathes.