Greetings from the future! The year is 2030, and sports have come a long way in the last 17 years. Allow me to elaborate.
No sense easing you into it. I might as well dive right in and let you know that human growth hormone is legal in the NFL now. Back in 2013, where you’re from, the information on HGH was still a little sketchy. For instance, your doctors weren’t sure what the negative repercussions would be on an otherwise healthy adult taking this synthetic version of something the body produces naturally in adolescence.
They also weren’t sure the extent to which it would impact performance, muscle mass or injury recovery. In the last 17 years, doctors have actually found that the negative side effects are minimal, and that HGH can be an effective healing tool when used in the right circumstances under doctor supervision.
HGH is now legal for the purpose of injury recovery and by prescription only. Treatment is supervised by a team of independent physicians contracted by the National Football League. A regular testing program was also implemented to combat improper use of the substance.
Speaking of injury recovery, Kobe’s knee treatment was finally approved by the FDA and is now legal in the United States. This procedure, also known as the Regenokine program, involves removing a portion of an athlete’s blood and spinning it in a centrifuge to break it down into its individual components.
One of those discreet components has been found to increase natural healing abilities and reduce inflammation. Following the manipulation of the blood, this liquid is injected back into the athlete’s affected area. This treatment is now commonplace, primarily for knee and other joint injuries.
In 2013, researchers were already on the verge of even more sophisticated treatments including stem cell therapy. The implementation of the Regenokine program in the U.S. opened the door for such treatments to be developed and adopted as the norm. Stem cell therapy is now used widely in the athletic community as a substitute for some knee surgeries. The procedure helps the body regenerate tissue through the use of its own cells.
This is often used for athletes who have experienced injuries such as torn knee cartilage. Derrick Rose, already on the brink of an injury-plagued career in 2013, suffered yet another knee injury in 2015.
Instead of opting for surgery, as he had after 2013’s torn meniscus, Rose was one of the first American athletes to opt for the new stem cell procedure instead. He went on to play 12 additional years in the NBA, winning two national championships and a total of three MVP awards.
Old procedures are also more common than ever now. Due to the dominance of pitching in your time, Major League Baseball decided to lower the mound again in 2015 (one of the first major acts of new commissioner Rob Manfred).
The aim of generating more runs also had the negative consequence of forcing pitchers to exert even more effort to throw at the same or lower speeds. Tommy John surgery is done on virtually almost every big league pitcher with at least 500 innings now.
Under Manfred’s tenor, baseball has also done a complete 180, becoming a leader in instant replay technology. Yes, the baseball purists lost the war. Somewhere around your time, the powers-that-be realized that the advancement of technology was quickly and inevitably becoming a trend that would continue to shape the face of sports on a regular basis. MLB was concerned about removing the human element of the game but finally ceded to pressure to keep up with its other professional league counterparts.
As you know, in 2014, baseball began using an enhanced replay system, allowing for manager challenges during games. At that time, all replays were handled by one central review facility in New York. Now, similar to college football, every play of the game is automatically reviewed (excluding balls and strikes). Each stadium has review capabilities in-house. If an umpire calls a safe man out at first, he immediately hears the correct call from the booth through a headset.
He himself wouldn’t make the correction – saving the time of having to look at footage. A member of the umpiring squad is assigned to the booth position. A change is only made when evidence is “indisputable” to borrow a term you surely recognize. Managers still have challenges, but still just the two that they had back in 2014. The difference with challenges now is that managers can challenge a called strike three.
The concern was always that enhanced replay would slow the game down. In baseball, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Quick and clear calls have put an end to managers arguing. That is, in fact, illegal now except in circumstances not related to play outcomes (e.g. Alex Rodriguez getting plunked by Ryan Dempster in 2013).
Commissioner Manfred also cracked down on an already existing rule, the time limit between pitches. Unbeknownst to many baseball fans in your day, the rules state that a pitcher can use only 12 seconds between pitches. In 2013, the actual average time between pitches was an astounding 27 seconds! Manfred simply began enforcing the 12-second rule, vastly shortening the length of games and allowing more time to be used for replay when needed.
Auto-officiating has helped speed things along as well. In 2013, a company called InfoMotion Sports Technologies developed a groundbreaking new basketball called the 94Fifty. The basketball was intended to be a training tool – it had sensors imbedded to record speed, trajectory, and backspin and ultimately help a user learn more about him/herself as a player. After using the ball in drills, players could get instantaneous feedback on how to improve their technique.
Also in 2013, sensors on players were being developed by a German football club. The sensors were placed on the athletes’ bodies with the goal of measuring various aspects of performance such as speed, acceleration, and ball contact.
Now, these two concepts have been combined and enhanced to include GPS functionality and ultimately enable auto-officiating in applicable circumstances. For example, the NFL uses footballs with not just sensors to measure movement data, but also with a GPS function. Using this function, spots are no longer made by officials, but by the ball itself automatically.
The sensors on the player and the ball work together – pinpointing the precise location of the ball when the players’ knee hits the ground. An app sends the information directly to the official, who physically spots the ball.
Regarding the NFL, player safety continued to be a concern even after the CTE lawsuit was settled. The legalization of HGH came about as a result of the increasing pressure on the NFL to do something about player safety. There was no testing for HGH, and therefore the likelihood was that some players were using and some weren’t – thereby UN-leveling the playing field.
All sports continued to make safety a major priority, with the NFL and NHL making significant advancements in helmets to fight off concussions. Safety continues to be an issue, yet both leagues are doing well as businesses. The real consequence of safety concerns is a dramatic drop in youth participation. In 2030, we can already see the effect this has on the shrinking of the talent pool across the both football and hockey.
Training methods and talent assessment have evolved as well. In 2013, Dr. Jocelyn Faubert of the University of Montreal was doing some truly innovative things with cognitive training for athletes. Instead of just practicing running, jumping, and running plays, athletes began to take part in cognitive training exercises as well.
These methods helped improve athletes’ abilities to track multiple objects at varying speeds and make quicker decisions due to faster and more efficient processing of information inside their heads. All major team sports (professional and college) now regularly use cognitive training methods based on Dr. Faubert’s studies.
Along these lines, cognitive abilities are now part of player assessments. The wonderlic is (thankfully) long-gone, and the traditional drills done at the NFL Combine carry less weight than they did in 2013. Physical assessments are still done, but in conjunction with mental ones.
As you know, social media was booming in 2013, drastically impacting the way teams, leagues and brands engaged fans. Twitter and YouTube are not only still being used as useful marketing tools, but they are in fact the primary tools. Every professional sports franchise has a social media department, sprawling with tech and marketing experts. Fan engagement is the number one priority in sports marketing, and integration of various social media platforms has blossomed as well.
I’m sad to inform you that the secondary ticket market did, as you might have predicted, dramatically impact the way fans view games. We are in an archaic society of “haves” and “have-nots” in the sports fan world, and almost everyone who attends the big games in professional and revenue-college sports is someone’s client, someone’s agency representative, or just plain rich.
A positive byproduct of that has been that the in-home viewing experience is outstanding. Fans now view sports in their homes on huge 3D televisions. Creative camera angles and player helmet cameras are the norm. The 2013 partnership between Microsoft and the NFL that produced a new level of fan engagement with the Xbox One was revolutionary. Fans now partake in video social networking as they watch games through devices like the original Xbox One.
Sports writing has changed dramatically as well. The only sports content generated by actual human imagination is creative content. All game recaps are generated automatically now by software. In 2013, Narrative Science, of Evanston, IL, had contracts with various leagues and teams to auto-generate game recaps immediately upon game’s end. The software used stats collected during the games to “write” very good basic recaps that you would never know are auto-generated. Now, many such companies exist to generate content for all types of news media outlets.
Well, those are pretty much the highlights. Oh and just for kicks, I thought you might like to know that the NCAA lost the O’Bannon suit. New regulations requiring the payment of student athletes in Bitcoins forced the NCAA to fold and relinquish control to the conferences along with an oversight committee. It’s crazy to think what can happen in 17 years. Check back in 2047 for another update.