Each NFL stadium is equipped with two cameras that help teams make play calls: one that provides a close up shot of the line of scrimmage, and another that offers a wide field of view so coaches and players can see the full play. Those cameras aren't new — they used to feed images to banks of printers that would spit out paper copies of each play during the game for immediate review by coaching staff. Paper comes with its own set of issues: it’s slow, wasteful, and falls apart in inclement weather. Now those cameras pipe images directly to the Surface tablets, eliminating the need for coaches to wait for the printers to do their jobs. Coaches can review images, mark them up using the Surface's stylus, and save them.

It was cold and rainy the night that we got to try out the NFL's Surfaces, and the tablets had no problems in the wet conditions. The rain didn't get in the way of writing on the screen with the stylus, which happens to be tethered to the case with a rope, and the display remained visible even with a fair amount of water on it.

The NFL could use the Surfaces for even more than it is

But for all the advancements, it still feels like Microsoft and the NFL could take the idea even further. The Surface Pro 2 could easily handle streaming video clips, for instance, but coaches are limited to just still captures during the game. All of the communication that happens between coaches on the sidelines and management in the sky boxes still happens over radio, even though there are dozens of wirelessly connected tablets on each sideline. Coaches also can't access their playbooks on the tablets, leaving them to rely on memory or paper copies. Every NFL player is wearing RFID tracking tags this season, which could be used to review a player’s exact movements moments later on the Surface tablet.

There's also the hurdle of getting coaches and players adapted to the new systems. Officials from the Jets tell us that their staff has adapted to the tablets without issue, but during the game, we observed Dolphins staff quickly running to their paper printouts — which are still available as a fallback — at the first sign of connectivity issues. The NFL manages and maintains hidden, secure wireless networks in each stadium for the Surfaces, but even that doesn't always ensure that connectivity issues won't crop up during a game. (The Dolphins went on to win the game, but it's hard to blame the Surfaces for the Jets' performance this season.)