Well, at least I would consider 76% accuracy to be pretty great when you need to time kicking a ball and actually manage to hit the right sensor. That and it's better than I score on a regular round of the game to begin with. [YouTube via HacknMod]

For $125 you get two coolers with a grill in the middle. Awesome, right? I mean, sure, you can toss a grill and two coolers in the back of your car for cheaper and with less lugging, but this is still a fun gimmick. Although if we're discussing practicality the real winner is the Foozie, which is a combo of a foam hand and a beer coozie. Only $10 for 2 of them! That's impulse purchase territory, folks. [Tailgate Approved]

The screen, which Titans punter AJ Trapasso pegged on Friday, hangs 90 feet above the field, which is just low enough to be in the way of seriously high punts. If it gets hit again the ball is ruled dead, the clock is set back and the play is done over. If it happens a lot this season, however, look for the league to force Jerry Jones to spend a couple million bucks to move it up 10 feet. [NFL via Engadget]

A whopping 33 HDTV models are on sale in the August 30th circular, including $1100 off several high-end Samsung LCDs. There are some nice Blu-Ray and stereo packages as well, sometimes up to $1500 off the regular price.

Apparently the start of football season is also the start of the big-screen buying season, although we wonder what Best Buy'll have to cut come Black Friday. Still, if you're in the market for a giant TV, next week might be the time to make the plunge. [HDGuru]

Apparently nobody had thought to test if a punted football could reach that high, and when Titans punter AJ Trapasso hit the screen, none of the officials knew quite what to do. It's not a reviewable play, but even if it were, it's not really fair to make a team waste a challenge on interference from the stadium which is entirely not the team's fault.

The solution? The NFL could change the rules so there's a "re-do" option if the screen is hit, which will require another referee to be watching the flight of the ball (none were at the game last night). Or the Cowboys owners could raise the screen to be out of the ball's flight path, but that would cost at least $2 million. It's a tricky situation, and one that'll have to be worked out quickly.

My suggestion: This screen seems like a real danger to the integrity of professional football. If the Cowboys owners will cover the delivery fee, I will be willing to take it off their hands. My email address is over there on the masthead. [ESPN, thanks Robert!]

Even though I was -9 years old in 1977, when Football was first released, and can't specifically remember ever playing it, the handheld itself, as well as those tiny red dots, is immediately recognizable to me. It's been featured in films like Bottle Rocket and Wet Hot American Summer, and chances are a lot of you readers have one or two of them in the bottom of a box somewhere in your basement. It was an incredibly, powerfully popular game, the first major handheld videogame smash, and judging by the Amazon reviews, people are still playing and loving it today. [Handheld Museum, Thanks Sean!]

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

It's a good idea, and combined with this technology, which monitors the force of impacts to the head, we could soon see the perfect helmet to make football an all-around safer activity. If that's what we want to do.

I can't be more clear: I don't like seeing kids dying out on the football field, or afterward because no one knew how badly they were injured or overheated. But the sporting culture seems to demand human sacrifice.

Why do pro boxers eschew the helmet that amateur Olympian pugilists are required to wear? Why are there entire insanely funny movies devoted to the fact that hockey got boring when it eased up on rink bloodshed? And why is it that most people only remember the car races where somebody flips up into the catchfence and scatters debris into the grandstand? Think it over. [PopSci]

OK, technically, the $12 Springback is intended for Peteca, a traditional Brazilian sport that's like badminton without the rackets. But we like to imagine using it for a touch game of football, our stick-like arms launching it farther than a leather football before, unable to actually catch the "ball," the Springback bounced many feet into the air for a house rules fumble. [Play via Nerd Approved]

The Atlantic has a great article about Fishman, known as Fish, who directs live football games on the fly. This stuff isn't planned out beforehand— it takes both an eye for cinematography and pace as well as an extraordinary understanding of the game itself, and Fish does almost every major sport. He has to know, for example, that a certain college basketball team relies on a full-court press for steals, and that the camera is going to have to follow the play immediately after a basket is scored instead of cutting away to the coach or the crowd.

It's pretty amazing stuff, a job very few people could even pretend to handle. [The Atlantic,image by Mark Peterson, Redux]

Bob Hayes died in 2002 and this letter was supposedly a thank you pre-written in the the hope that he would someday enter into the Hall of Fame after three decades of disappointment. Naturally, a reading at the conference by his half-sister Lucille Hester sparked a lot of emotion among the Cowboy's organization, the fans and the NFL. However, it appears that the letter is actually a forgery, and Lucille may be a Texas-sized fraud.

Hayes' true relatives have long argued that Hester was nothing more than a friend during the last years of his life—and an examination of the letter has concluded that the signature is a blatant forgery and it was typed in Calibri—a font that didn't exist until Microsoft introduced it in Office 2007. If that wasn't enough, his legendary teammate Roger Staubach's name is misspelled in the document.

So, if these allegations are true, what is Hester's motive? According to those involved she is an attention seeker that is using Hayes' name to glorify herself. At this point, the Hayes family is investigating their options. Involving the law is a definite possibility, but in the immediate future they are trying to ensure that Hester doesn't get any where near the stage during the induction ceremony on August 8th. [DallasNews via Yahoo Sports]

Coverage of the game includes 35 high-end cameras, all focused on never missing even the smallest of details. They've rewired Tampa's stadium with 50 miles of fiber-optic cable to transmit the feeds from all of them, and are nearly doubling the on-site production crew compared to a typical Sunday Night Football broadcast. Aside from the expected overhead and goal line cameras, they've placed a camera in each goal post and in the hallway leading to each locker room for reasons I wouldn't want a football fan to explain to me.

The main cameras are Sony HDC-900/950s, with HD Canon lenses, and several "X-Mo" cameras for frame-by-frame analysis of the sidelines and goal lines. And just to be on the safe side, NBC is bringing along "several" 450-kilowatt backup generators.

Luckily, NBC won't be carrying over Fox's horrible dancing robot. Thank god for that. [Broadcasting and Cable]

From optical sensors to audio transmissions, the heaviest lifting is probably done by the color filters that, year after year, become better and better at differentiation the line from the linebacker. This brief video will do a lot to make you appreciate the resourceful crews behind the broadcasts.

Dr. Priya Narasimhan of Carnegie Mellon University has developed the football and gloves, loading them up with wireless sensors that can precisely determine whether or not a ball hit the ground before being caught or whether or not someone had control of the ball before fumbling. It could also, using GPS, determine whether or not the ball cross the goal line. But the applications don't stop there.

Eventually, the same kind of sensors used in the gloves could be adapted to shoes, to measure stride and running patterns, or even shoulder pads, to calculate blocking positions and force.

The current version of the glove has 15 touch sensors on the fingers and palm, running to a wireless module on the back of the arm, said Adam Goldhammer of Richboro, Bucks County, a master's student in electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon.

"Knowing these contact points can tell how a ball is being thrown and how different people throw," he said, "so you could train how someone is throwing to match how they should throw."

Currently, there are no teams or football organizations on board with the technology, but I wouldn't be surprised if a network got on board to help them create super-accurate animations and recreations of plays. [Post Gazette via Engadget]

Float Ball is a combination of football and basketball in a zero gravity environment. Players bounce their way through the court, ricocheting off the floor, ceiling, obstacles and other players. The goal is to throw the ball through the hoop. The bigger goal is to throw your player with the ball through the hoop—a maneuver we're coining right this second as the space jam.

Despite Harvey's popularity space entertainment circles, he has no plans on how to fund the space sport. But he doesn't expect the vision to actualize over night. Astronaut fitness programs coupled with VR simulators would naturally progress into high stakes competitive sportutainment. And while he may be right, Harvey forgets about one thing:

Geeks hate jocks. So go build your own spaceship, a'hole. [NYT]