AI is coming whether we want it or not.
This was an interesting read:
This post by Benjamin Dias ('25) discusses how technological improvement has given birth to greater social scrutiny of referee performance. Beyond replay review, Sports Governing Organizations like the National Football League, National Basketball Association, and Major League Baseball have...
www.vanderbilt.edu
There's certainly plenty of room to add existing technology to assist in their work, without it being true full "AI", and that would reduce the workload of human refs. Namely out of bounds, offsides, number of players on the field, intentional grounding (monitor QB location in pocket), forward progress (first downs and TDs etc), backward passes, false starts, etc... all the things that are measurable in a completely objective sense could be turned over to tech, freeing up the humans to watch for the subjective/safety stuff.
It's really not necessary to keep the job harder than it has to be. Can you think of any other job where you wouldn't immediately jump to use existing tech to increase accuracy and efficiency?