An inventor and diehard USC fan from Rosemead was the first to patent the virtual yellow line on football telecasts, changing the way we watch the game forever.
Let’s talk evolution, innovation, forward progress in football, that glorious game of inches.
Ask 10 teammates to name the coolest football invention they’ve come across and get 10 different answers.
“NIL has revolutionized college football in so many ways, so it’s really awesome to be a part of such a revolutionary time,” offered USC offensive lineman Kilian O’Connor.
“The automated JUGS machines,” Trojans punter Eddie Czaplicki said. “It basically acts as a quarterback, you can have a chip and you can put it on your waist, and it can shoot passes to receivers in stride … and I’ve been able to set it up when I don’t have a snapper so I can still do live punts.”
“The innovation of the helmet, as far as safety,” offensive lineman Emmanuel Pregnon added. “That’s constantly evolving and I’m only grateful for it.”
“The sky cam that you have on the wires around every NFL and college game now,” said Gavin Meyer, a defensive tackle who has transferred to USC. “Even at the University of Wyoming, you have that cam flying around the stadium. It’s wild, watching it, you feel like you’re on the field with the players.”
You know what would have really blown these guys’ minds, had it not existed all of their lives already?
The yellow line. You know, the virtual “1st-and-10” marker on the TV screen that we’ve all come to count on to spot exactly how many yards – or inches – a team needs to move the chains?
Imagine being the first person to come up with the notion to clearly demarcate the first-and-10 line for viewers.
Imagine being David Crain.
1st & Ten—that yellow first-down line you see while watching football on television—has won two Emmy Awards. pic.twitter.com/Rg0e50Fm14
— Mental Floss (@mental_floss) September 18, 2016
He’s a 77-year-old USC alumnus and teacher and diehard Trojans football fan who got the idea watching the 1973 Gator Bowl.
“An obscure football game,” Crain called Texas Tech’s 28-19 victory over Tennessee long, long ago. “But it just happened to be the moment the idea hit me, because that game featured a lot of sideline plays next to the chains and it occurred to me, ‘You know, there’s a better way to do this on television.’”
At the time, Crain was employed at the United States Naval Oceans System Command, “working with some pretty heavy technology stuff” that involved developing microelectronics for anti-submarine warfare.
“And I learned that you could do this if you had two things: A heavily instrumented camera that kind of knows what it’s pointed at, and a mathematical model of the target – or of the football field.”
So the Rosemead native with a lifelong interest in technology, whose class was among the first at Don Bosco Tech, dialed it in. He figured out the way to present augmented television coverage of the game by inserting a graphical element as if it were physically present – something no one had previously conceived of. (It surprised him, he said, that no one had).
And the Office of Naval Research – seeing the potential to use the idea in undersea exploration and navigation – helped Crain patent the idea in 1978.
They called it a “TV Object locator and image identifier,” as broad a patent name as they could come up with.
An abstract that describes Crain’s patent begins: “A television object locator and image identifier, for use with a TV camera tube, having a lens whose axis is determined by the angles θc and φc …”
Basically, lengthy calculations that sail way over the head of someone like me, who needs an augmented yellow line just to calculate 10 – x.
Soon after his patent was granted April 11, 1978, Crain set out trying to market the concept, trying to persuade television networks to adopt and develop it. But he got only a few nibbles, he said, including a phone call from Roone Arledge, the pioneering executive who influenced much of how we watch sports, including “Monday Night Football” and slow-motion replay.
“He and I talked back and forth over the phone for a while, and then finally, he said, ‘That patent is worth more to you than it is to us,’” recalled Crain, who eventually moved on, his big idea rebuffed by executives whose networks didn’t yet have the technological or computing power to put the idea into motion.
But also, Crain thinks, “they didn’t see it.”
25 years ago today, during the Bengals vs. Ravens Sunday Night Football game, ESPN introduced the 1st and Ten line for the very first time. pic.twitter.com/5oFmA4Qw5M
— HOMAGE (@HOMAGE) September 27, 2023
No one did, not for another 20 years, not until the technology debuted during an ESPN telecast of the Cincinnati Bengals-Baltimore Ravens game on Sept. 27, 1998, a couple of years after the ill-fated “glow puck” experiment during hockey telecasts.
There are now 30 inventions that cite Crain’s patent, ranging from the telestrator system to the virtual strike zone, ideas that go far beyond anything he could have imagined, even if contemporary sports fans would have a hard time imagining life without them.
Like the yellow line.
“It would be different, it would be super-different” not to have the virtual first-down line, said Trojans wide receiver Kyron Hudson, who pegs Lincoln Riley’s play calls as some of the best football innovation he’s witnessed.
“Being a football player myself, you understand it,” Hudson said. “But people who don’t know what football is, it would bother.”
“Too mathematical, in a way,” said Anthony Beavers Jr., for whom the advent of iPads on the sideline has been the biggest game-changer.
“It’s just in my head that that first-down line’s gonna be there,” Meyer said. “It’s even in my head when I’m out on the field, I always have that in the back of my mind, the spatial awareness part of it.”
Crain, a visionary football fan who foresees a 2024 season in which his Trojans surprise naysayers, would appreciate that: “It’s the best idea I ever had,” he said, with a chuckle.
Any way you stop and measure it, Crain’s invention remains a bright yellow highlight in a game that’s constantly reinventing itself. And a win for everyone tuning in.
