Soon, NFL players will have a better way to see what happened on the last play than tilting their heads back to check out the scoreboard. The National Football League announced a partnership with Microsoft, through which coaches and officials will use Microsoft’s Surface tablets on the sidelines, potentially replacing coaches’ laminated playbooks and Polaroid images used by quarterbacks to figure out what went wrong on that last interception. The partnership also includes plans to use the Surface and next-generation Xbox game console for interactive viewing experiences for fans. Giving coaches and officials access to tablet computers seems like an obvious step for the league, which, after all, exists in the 21st century. But the NFL has a Luddite streak. Over the last several seasons, many teams have begun using iPads as playbooks during practice, but they had to leave the devices behind on game day.