Almost nobody watches a game with only the game on. The phone is already in your hand. The question is what is on it.
Most second screen habits are just a faster way to find out what you already saw. Here is what actually adds something the broadcast is not giving you.
Before kickoff: who is officiating
The crew is announced days before the game and most fans never hear about it. It costs thirty seconds to look up and it is the only pre-game input that nobody in your group chat has.
What you want from it is narrow. One foul type that matters for this specific matchup, and the sample behind the number. Not a leaderboard. We wrote up what a crew report has to show you before you believe it, because most of them show you a penalty average and nothing else.
During: win probability, not the score
The score tells you who is ahead. Win probability tells you how much that is worth given the down, the field position, the clock and the timeouts.
Down four with two minutes left and the ball is a different game from down four with two minutes left and no timeouts. The scoreboard shows those as identical. A win probability number does not, and watching it move is the fastest way to learn which moments actually mattered.
Treat the decimals with suspicion. Public models disagree with each other by real margins on the same snap. Use it to rank moments, not to settle arguments.
During: play by play, for the thing you missed
Broadcasts move on. A play by play feed does not. When the announcers skip the personnel or the flag comes late and nobody explains it, the text is where the answer is.
This is the least glamorous thing on the list and the one people use most.
On the flag: rate it before you argue about it
The moment the flag hits the grass, everyone in the building has an opinion. Ten seconds later the replay has started rewriting it.
Scoring the call one to five while it is still live does two things. It fixes what you actually thought before the slow motion and the announcer got to you. And it gives you the crowd verdict, which is the only honest answer to whether you saw something real or just watched your team lose forty yards.
Four questions decide whether a call was bad or just expensive, and we laid them out in how to read a call in real time. The short version: what does the rule require, did the official who threw it have the angle, was it consistent inside this game, and would you accept it going the other way.
After: the cost, not the recap
Sunday night is the most crowded hour in sports media and every recap says the same thing. None of them answer the question you are actually carrying, which is what the flags cost.
Measured in win probability rather than yards, most penalties in a given game barely touch the outcome and a couple do all the damage. That gap is the whole point, and it is also where most penalty analysis quietly cheats. A flag worth minus twelve percentage points does not mean your team would otherwise have won. It means the estimate was twelve points higher a moment earlier. Those are different claims.
What to leave closed
Raw penalty counts. They add a first quarter false start to a fourth quarter pass interference and call them both one flag, which is how a team flagged nine times ends up feeling robbed by a team flagged four.
Single game crew stats. One game tells you nothing about a crew and the number will be quoted at you all week as if it does.
Anything that only shows you the calls that went against your team. That is the sample problem that makes every fan base certain it is uniquely cursed, and it is most of the distance between the table and the group chat.
The short version
Before kickoff, the crew and one foul type. During, win probability and play by play. On the flag, your own rating before the replay talks you out of it. After, what each call cost.
That is four things, and ChallengeFlag puts them on one screen. The score is everywhere. This is the part the score does not tell you.