Twenty-two jumbo-sized football players are lined up within a few yards of each other. The ball is at the San Francisco 49ers' 1-yard line. Everyone knows it's going to Minnesota Vikings tailback Adrian Peterson, who has a chance to give his team a late lead in its opening game of the season.

Peterson takes the handoff from quarterback Teddy Bridgewater and plows into the left side of the line. The 49ers' defense stands strong. Falling to the ground, Peterson attempts to reach the ball over the goal line before the play is ruled dead.

Did he get there? Did the ball break the plane? Or did his knee touch the ground first?

The NFL is studying ways to address such questions via replay following a vocal endorsement this spring from New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. Cost and reliability issues might make permanent goal-line cameras impractical at the moment, as we noted this spring. But if this scenario were to arise Monday night at Levi's Stadium, or on any of ESPN's Monday Night Football broadcasts this season, the NFL will have an additional tool for spotting a football's location at or near the goal line.

ESPN's Pylon Cam will not save the world from goal-line controversies. (Alas.) What it will do, however, is provide viewers and the NFL with new angles of game action that will add to the referee's options during replay reviews. The system debuted during ESPN's broadcast of the College Football Playoff National Championship in January and, after evolving a few times during further testing, was approved earlier this month for use in regular-season NFL games.

"The cameras will serve two functions," said Jed Drake, ESPN's senior vice president of product innovation. "They'll provide some spectacular angles that viewers haven't seen before, but also hopefully show a case-closed perspective of looking up the sideline and at the goal line, for definitive proof as to whether or not the player was in or out."

Starting with the Week 1 doubleheader in Atlanta and San Francisco, each goal-line pylon will be outfitted with four micro cameras designed by BSI. Gilman Gear helped design an exterior that is nearly identical to traditional pylons in terms of cushion and safety. Should a player land on the pylon, it will crumple internally to prevent injury, according to ESPN director of product enhancement Marc Rowley.

A pylon, of course, typically extends 18 inches off the ground, and the question is how often it will be blocked by one of the 29 players or officials on the field for any given play. Similar concerns surround the request Belichick made for permanent camera systems to be installed in all stadiums, but at the moment, Pylon Cam is best considered a bonus angle -- of the goal line, the sideline or the end line -- that will be utilized when available.

"The short of it is we're adding 16 cameras to the field," Drake said. "I've had the same conversation about the NBA. For an NBA game, they have 30-some cameras. Can every key play have a definitive replay? The answer is no. On Monday Night Football, we put more cameras on the field than any other broadcaster. How many cameras does it take to perfectly document everything? We don't know. But we're increasing our odds significantly."

While we're at it, let's take a look at a couple of other new technologies available to the NFL during the 2015 season:

Next-gen stats

The NFL and Zebra Technologies have expanded this program to all 1,696 players and 33 stadiums (including London's Wembley Stadium and Hawaii's Aloha Stadium). Two active RFID chips installed in shoulder pads will transmit player movement data into the NFL cloud.

The data includes player speed, distance traveled and positional data on every play, a sampling of which you might already have seen on regional broadcasts during Week 1. The NFL will present the data through Microsoft's Xbox One and in a dashboard format when accessing via Windows 10 as a second screen.

"If [Seattle Seahawks quarterback] Russell Wilson is scrambling on a play, you'll see how far he ran in terms of pure distance and yards," said Jeff Tran, Microsoft's director of sports marketing and alliances. "If [Seahawks receiver] Tyler Lockett is running down the field you'll see exactly how fast he's really running compared to his teammates and his opponents."

As we discussed during the winter, this data is only a sliver of what the RFID chips generate. The NFL's competition committee is still evaluating the impact of the full data warehouse and is not yet making it available publicly or even to teams.

"That might be a while," said Jill Stelfox, Zebra's vice president and general manager. "They want to make sure that there is fairness across the teams with the ability to process the data."

Sideline tablets

The NFL's foray into sideline tablet use is in its second year. The custom-designed Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is waterproof and can operate in temperatures between 10 below and 120 degrees.

The tablets primarily serve as photo viewers, replacing the tradition of printing out photographs on the sideline. Team video editors upload photographs via a dedicated wireless network in the stadium. This season, the tablets will allow coaches to annotate with four different colors and can also be used as a mini-whiteboard.

The NFL is notoriously slow in adapting on-field technology, but the Surface Pro 3 tablet has been tested for video at more than 20 games, both for use in replay reviews and for coaches and players who might want to analyze a play in near-real time. As with next-gen stats, the NFL is still evaluating what it considers a fair method for distributing and using in-game video.