Ask enough college football coaches about technology, and the consistent message about its benefits will boil down to whether it saves them any time.
Time is a precious resource in football. You have one week to prepare for a given opponent and less than a week if you factor in travel.
Then there’s all that time devoted to recruiting – which has become, without exaggeration, a year-round pursuit – and it’s pretty clear that coaches are working longer hours than ever before.
“We’re in junior’s homes in January now,” Montana head coach Bobby Hauck said at the Big Sky football meetings in July. “It’s wild. We’re killing our assistant coaches.”
But it’s clear that technology isn’t abandoning college football. No one is setting aside offseason online scouting, game-week film preparation or in-game communication and feedback in favor of playing football like a neighborhood pickup game.
No, technology continues to give coaches more information throughout their week, including during the games themselves. And coaches are not eager to dismiss more information.
The latest development, at the FCS level, is in-helmet communication, a privilege given to one player on the defense and the offense and then to just about as many people on the sidelines or in the booth as a team wants.
“It was choppy at first,” Eastern Washington offensive coordinator Marc Anderson said this week as the Eagles wrapped up preseason camp and shifted their preparations for Week 1 opponent Incarnate Word.
“I think it was weird for them hearing the voice all the time,” Anderson said of the team’s quarterbacks, “but I think we’ve smoothed it out, and I think everybody enjoys it. It’s fairly functional overall.”
In-game helmet communication is the latest storyline to follow as the sport attempts to exploit the advantages of technology while still staying true to the essence of all sports: May the best team win.
“We’re not going, ‘Hey Siri, what do you think on second-and-8?’ ” Hauck said with a laugh. “It may come to that. That’ll be the end of the game.”
It hasn’t come to that, of course. But the idea that it might isn’t all that difficult to imagine. The question is: At what point is too much technology just that – too much?
‘We can make adjustments pretty quickly’
Paul Wulff has been a football coach for 32 years, longer than just about anyone in the Big Sky Conference. He’s seen every change technology has brought to the sport over that span, including the dawn of sideline photos in the NFL, when he was an assistant with the San Francisco 49ers 13 years ago.
“We didn’t have tablets at the time, but photos,” Wulff said this summer at the Big Sky meetings. “We were given (photos) pre-snap, right in the middle (of a play) and at the end. That was my first exposure. And as good as the players were, you could look at it and you’d run a play or two and you couldn’t go back to that same play. The defense would knock it out.”
The ability to adjust isn’t quite that good in the FCS, Wulff said. But with tablets on the sidelines in college, ones that allow video, not just photos, the FCS is catching up in capability if not deftness.
“You can do stuff immediately now that you were never able to do,” said Wulff, now the head coach at Cal Poly “So the video on the sidelines has been tremendous. We can make adjustments pretty quickly.”
Eastern Washington has adopted the tablets on the sidelines as well, but in preseason practices the practicality of them is overshadowed by the importance of getting in reps. Simply put, the time coaches could devote to studying film during a scrimmage is trumped by the value of jumping right into the next play.
But in games, Anderson said they are very useful as tools to help the offense attack the opposition more effectively.
“You have video of everything, and you don’t have to necessarily see things live,” said Anderson, who plans to be on the sidelines during games this season, not in the booth. “You can go back and look at it.”
The use of film study in-game is new, but film study has long been a part of game preparation. That process – of getting ready to face another opponent by watching what they’ve done previously – has been sped up considerably by online websites like Pro Football Focus.
“It’s all about efficiency,” said Hauck, who also uses similar platforms to watch highlights of recruits. “So when you can interface film with data at the click of a mouse and have all that stuff in there, it makes your staff more efficient, so you can spend more time on doing exactly what you’re used to: immersing yourself in film, getting a feel for what’s going on. Because again, we’re still calling it on Saturdays.”
The power of PFF to streamline preparation was universally praised by the league’s coaches. Instead of a staffer spending time splicing game film into specific plays and then tagging each clip with various labels, PFF does that all for them.
Want to see every opponent’s first down play? Just a click away. What about all snaps played by a star defensive lineman? Isolated almost immediately. Simply want to see first-and-goal plays by your next opponent? No problem.
“I’m old school. I’ve done the same thing preparation-wise,” Weber State head coach Mickey Mental said. “Now with technology you can have more information available quicker. I think if it shortens time, it’s definitely worth investing in.”
Players like it, too. The capability to quickly produce cut-ups of every play an opposing cornerback, offensive tackle or running back has run that season – or in seasons past – saves time in their minds, and it helps them focus their preparation.
They can even watch films on themselves, looking for tendencies that opponents might pick up and exploit.
“If I press a certain way a lot of the time, I’ve noticed that when I go into games people will have a release that counters that,” EWU senior cornerback DaJean Wells said.
So, Wells said, he’ll adapt his game accordingly.
“I don’t want to have one technique,” he said. “One week I might be more aggressive, some weeks I might be more passive and give a little bit of ground, depending on the receiver and what they do.”
Looking for what works
Yet all the preparation in the week leading up to the game will not substitute for the adjustments players will make mid-game.
Rex Connors, the UC Davis senior defensive back who was named preseason Big Sky defensive MVP, prepares as thoroughly as anyone in the league. But by the end of the week, he’s content with what he’s done and relies on his ability to adjust once the game starts.
“For me at least, I try to remember a couple things (from film),” Connors said. “If I see those couple things come up, I’ll have a head start and know what’s coming.”
Wide receiver Samuel Gbatu Jr., Connors’ teammate, takes a similar approach.
“As the offensive guy, I’m watching and seeing how I can beat this guy, what releases have worked on him through my film study, what releases have not worked,” Gbatu said. “I am going to start the game based on that. I am going to try something, and I’ll see what works on the first drive and what doesn’t work.”
Connors and Gbatu are practicing an approach that has long been universal. Players have watched game film for decades. But the precision with which they can do so is made possible by PFF, the latest advantage in an arms race that has only continued.
Tablets on the sidelines have come next, with players and coaches able to watch film in-game.
In-helmet communication is the latest technology to be adopted.
“A lot of teams drove it because of sign stealing,” EWU head coach Aaron Best said on Friday following the Eagles’ final preseason scrimmage.
But that hasn’t been a major issue for the Eagles, who have run up-tempo offenses for some time. And even with the new communication ability, Best said Eastern will be able to use signals should the technology fail.
“When you play fast, it’s hard to steal signs and echo what those signs are to get the 11 guys on defense or offense to truly know what’s going on,” Best said. “We can navigate through it if we need to nonverbally.”
Eastern’s first regular-season test of the new helmets will be Saturday in San Antonio, when the Eagles open against fifth-ranked Incarnate Word. All fall camp, the Eagles have practiced every day with the communication enabled. Only a few times have they run into hiccups when using it with quarterbacks Jared Taylor, Nate Bell and Jake Schakel.
“A couple times we split periods so we were on different fields, so I would say a play to Jared (Taylor) and Jake (Schakel) would hear it in his helmet,” Anderson said. “So, we had to work through some of that. But it’s been quite good for those three guys.”
The comms will go silent for the quarterbacks with 15 seconds left on the playclock. Before that, Anderson will have a couple switches that allow him to talk to the quarterback and the rest of the coaching staff. He said he’s trying not to overload Taylor with information.
“I think it’s helpful overall. The quarterbacks enjoy it,” Anderson said. “I think the trick is not getting in their heads too much, not telling them every single thing that’s going on.”
To Taylor, the extra layer of communication is reassuring.
“Coach Anderson’s not one to start yelling at you or anything. He’s there to help me out,” Taylor said. “It makes me feel better and gives me confidence. He can say these things that might be minor to some, but to me with everything going on on the field, it’s like, (I can say), I’m good.”
