 Football may be all about the action on the field, but on the sidelines, it's all about the data. For years, NFL coaches have used printed-out images of on-field action to review plays and make adjustments. But this year, things are a little different. If you've been watching NFL games this season, it's been hard to miss the bright blue surface tablets that players and coaches grab nearly every time they return to the sidelines. Those tablets are the product of a partnership between Microsoft and the NFL to bring the coaching techniques of professional football teams into the modern era. At their core, the tablets are modified Surface Pro 2 devices. We got to test drive these Surface tablets that the NFL is using on a cold, rainy night in MetLife Stadium just before the New York Jets took the field to play against Miami Dolphins. They are encased in these bright blue cases that have giant hand straps and the Surface's stylus attached to it via rope. The NFL's surfaces are actually running Windows, but it's hard to tell from the outside. They're locked to a specific app, which receives images of on-field play from two cameras set up in every NFL stadium. One camera provides a tight view of the line of scrimmage, while the other is a wider shot of the whole field. Coaches and players can instantly review the images, use the Surface's pen as a telestrator to mark them up, and then save them for later review. And that's really about it. Players on the sidelines can't do much else with the surfaces. There's no video feed, no web browser, and certainly no Facebook app. The system is designed to replace the banks of printers that were used in-game to print out images of each play immediately after it occurred. There are plenty of obvious drawbacks to using paper printouts in the middle of a game. They're slow, wasteful, and get quickly ruined if there's any sort of precipitation going on, which happens pretty often during NFL games. They also can't easily be referenced later on in the game. Microsoft's solution actually addresses each one of those points. It's nearly instantaneous, it lets coaches review plays over and over again, and the tablets are impervious to the elements. But it's hard to shake the feeling that this idea could easily be taken further. All of the coaches' communication with higher-ups and skyboxes around the stadium still happens over radio, and the Surface tablets don't support video of any kind this year. There's also the hurdle of getting coaches and players adjusted to this new system. Though the Jets say their staff has adapted to it pretty well, we definitely observed coaches on the Dolphins quickly falling back to their trusty paper printouts at the first sign of connectivity issues during the game. All 32 NFL teams are using the Surface tablets this year, and each of the 31 stadiums across the US are set up with the necessary cameras and infrastructure to support them, including special charging and storage bins and exclusive Wi-Fi networks for the services to connect to. The coaches who are trapped in the NFL say they're committed to making this happen, so it's likely we'll be seeing the bright blue tablets in the hands of pro football players for years to come. Just don't go calling them iPads.