SportTechie’s Athletes Voice series features the views and opinions of the athletes who use and are powered by technology. SportTechie talked to NFLPA president Eric Winston about how technology evolved during his 12-year playing career and what areas of tech the players’ association is most interested in.
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Following an All-America selection in his senior year at Miami, offensive tackle Eric Winston entered the 2006 draft and had a distinguished NFL career with the Texans, Chiefs, Cardinals, and Bengals. Though he last played in 2017, he may end up having a bigger impact on the sport now that his playing days are over.
Winston was elected NFLPA president in 2014 and is now in his third two-year term. As part of the players’ leadership, the 35-year-old helps guide policy decisions and provides support for players off the field. That role spans setting rules on data gleaned from wearable technology to helping young players make sound financial decisions to facilitating investment opportunities for the entrepreneurial set.
Today’s Technology
“Each individual player is so much more aware of [technology] than I think they were in the past. They’ve grown up with it. All these guys that are now coming into the NFL, they’ve all pretty much grown up with Apple stuff—and not just Apple, but I’m just giving that example. I was in the NFL when there weren’t iPhones and there weren’t iPads. It’s just so different of a technological upbringing that they’ve had compared to what I’ve seen.”
“When I was in college, we had just switched over to all computer-based digital film. When I was in college at one point, we were still doing Betamax stuff. That wasn’t that long ago. That was early 2000s. When I got to the NFL, we definitely were switched over to digital, but iPads and all this—no one knew about that. We still had big binders and notebooks of playbooks and things of that nature, where everybody now just has iPads for playbooks.”
Influence on Strategy
“Digging a little deeper into the film stuff, the databases and the things that coaches are able to do now in sorting film has led to much different offensive play-calling and the ability to do so much more in a short amount of time. [Coaches] were just incapable of doing some of the big sorts and being able to move things around like they can these days.
“I think that’s why you’re seeing a lot of different styles of offenses. Obviously some of it is necessity and players coming up through college doing different offenses, but I really believe that technology has democratized the game in the sense of everybody can see everything. If some team is doing some wild thing in Kansas, it’s going to spread pretty quickly. It’s the same thing on defense. I do see that as has been a big change.”
Data and Wearables
“Guys now are wearing certain wearables, like maybe a Whoop or something like that, to chart sleep and to look at how many high-intensity steps they’ve taken in a day and [see their] top speeds and all of those things that are now going into performance training. That’s a huge difference than when I got there. When I got there, it was the old-school ‘Let’s put a bunch of weight on the squat rack and let’s get after it.’ Now it’s all about training smart and preserving your body. The technology has obviously also reached into recovery.
“Not all teams are built the same. Some teams were very forward-thinking and wanted the new technology. I know Seattle used to have iPads on the wall when you walked in. You had to rate your stress level and how many hours of sleep you got last night because they wanted to make sure that, if you were high-stress, low-sleep, maybe they backed off you a little bit—at least that was the story. I don’t know if they actually did that or not. I know they were charting that stuff.
“I think the wearables, the sensors, those sort of things have been the big splash and, to a large degree, probably the wave of the future going forward. People haven’t figured out what that hardware is going to be, whether it’s a patch, whether it’s a watch, whether it’s a strap of some sort, whatever it is that people are going to wear and continue to wear and want to wear to chart your personal info. But I really think something’s going to end up coming that everybody will want to have it, everybody will want to do it.
“How does that all really correlate together? How does all this information that we’ve gathered—what does it mean? Can you really do anything predictive with it? Can you really say anything definitive? I think that’s going to be the real question going forward.”
Data Privacy
“I can tell you from a player standpoint, it’s one thing to say ‘Oh, that guy ran 60 yards.’ We all see that. It’s another thing to even say the guy ran a certain miles per hour. You can time certain things and convert it over to miles an hour, so that’s not crazy.
“But if you start getting into these ideas of heart rate and [if] you start getting into these ideas of very personal information, that’s what it is—it’s personal information. It’s not something that your employer should be able to just [say] ‘Oh, we own that.’ No, you don’t. No employer owns the heart rate [monitoring] of an employee. No one’s ever done that. To think that that should just be part of it, to me, is crazy. And unacceptable, quite frankly … At the end of the day, if there’s something that we all want to agree on together or not agree on together, then maybe there is, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s how I look at players’ data: it’s personal and it’s private.”
Protecting Against Injury
“The NFL changed in the time I was playing. I always give this comparison in the health and safety space. When I started my rookie year, ESPN was still doing ‘You Got Jacked Up.’ They were [showing] huge hits over the middle, and gosh, a poor teammate of mine won it, I think, two weeks in a row.
“When I got out [of the league], obviously we have concussion protocols, and the awareness is so much bigger. The science was so much further along. The medical studies were so much further along. Just in the health and safety space, that’s a huge amount of ground that was covered in 12 years, then the rules changes and everything else that has come along with it are obviously much different.
“But there’s got to be better ways to wear shoulder pads. There’s got to be better ways to have some of these things and wear some of this padding that can protect to a greater deal. Hopefully those come out, and I think there’s good incentives in the marketplace, quite frankly, for something like that to come out.
“Obviously sports has become a big business, and I know thousands and thousands of people buying your product because it’s superior is probably good business. I’m hoping that that shows itself and that someone comes up with the shoulder pads 2.0 and especially helmet 2.0. I don’t know if we can ever say, ‘Let’s have a helmet that’s going to take away concussions.’ I don’t know if that’s really possible. I don’t know if that’s being sensible or being realistic, but let’s try. Let’s figure it out if that is possible.”
Financial Literacy
“We’ve talked with firms and are doing things [where] we can send out specialized budgets to each player. We know how they’re going to get paid. We know sort of what their lifestyle/special unique things that go on in their life, so we can populate some of that stuff and send out a budget. We can say, ‘Hey, we know these three things, these are the things you need to be aware of. You need to say how much are you going to spend on X, how much are you going to spend on Y.’ That’s a good way to help them along in the idea of spending.
“I’ve always believed that it’s not a savings problem that sometimes athletes have. It’s a spending problem. It’s not a smart/dumb thing. People always equate this to a smart/dumb thing. It’s [that] they’ve never been taught before. When you first start out of college, most people aren’t making very much, so the mistakes they make are small mistakes. You don’t have a lot of room for error because there is no room for error when it’s something like that.
“Obviously when you come into the NFL, your minimum salary is really big. And so there is some room for big errors and that’s where hopefully we can try to prevent some of that stuff with not just the teaching but some of these technological items and budgetary items that we can pass along to players. We can help them get jumpstarted and have a better understanding going forward right when they come into the league.”
Player Entrepreneurship
“We started the OneTeam Collective, obviously out of good business sense, but everything we do also has a component that allows players to engage in some of their interests. OneTeam Collective is certainly in that vein. We’re able to now make connections and make introductions and get guys exposed to some areas [where] they have a big passion but might not know a lot.
“This idea of tech and venture and all these big buzzwords—we’re experiencing a lot of that with the OneTeam Collective so we’re able to make these introductions with guys like Kelvin Beachum and other guys that are doing their homework, trying to understand it, and want to be exposed to it. That’s fun and that’s exciting, and that’s, I think, really part of our mission and our duty at the [NFLPA] to provide those opportunities for guys thinking broadly and thinking big about what’s happening after their careers are over.”
The NFLPA reviewed this content before publication.
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