Ever since lead investor Tom Dundon abruptly shuttered the Alliance of American Football and canceled the remainder of its first season on Apr. 2, questions have persisted about what will become of the league’s technology platform.
The AAF’s predictive gaming app delivered data from the field to mobile devices in about 200 milliseconds, making it attractive as the basis for sports betting platforms. MGM Resorts made an early investment in the system, which included the option of owning the technology outright if the league were to go out of business, according to a report by The Action Network.
The usability of that gaming platform in the future, however, may be limited, according to two senior members of the AAF engineering team who agreed to speak to SportTechie on condition of anonymity.
“The big joke about the ‘who owns the IP’ thing is that the IP is mostly in the heads of the team, none of whom work for the Alliance anymore,” the first AAF engineer said. “Basically you’re buying the playbook. They own the source code, but basically you’re buying the playbook of the New England Patriots, but not hiring [Bill] Belichick or the coaches or any of the players.”
The tech arm of the AAF started its work under the name Alliance Digital nearly two years before football games began in February. The gaming app launched at the start of the season with new features added each week.
“The American Alliance of Football has had major accomplishments and innovations that will impact how fans consume and enjoy professional football in the years to come,” a spokesperson for MGM Resorts said in a statement to SportTechie. “As a sports betting partner of the AAF, we believe their innovations and groundbreaking sports technology represent the future of sports betting and fan engagement. We look forward to building on their developments as we continue our work to revolutionize the sports and entertainment experience for fans.”
The technology team hailed from blue-chip companies such as BitTorrent, Intel, and Tesla, according to a review of LinkedIn profiles. The first engineer SportTechie spoke to said that others came from Google and Bitcoin. Many of those employees have now begun interviewing with other tech companies, but that engineer expressed interest in finding a way to keep the development team together.
“We really just got started with it,” the second AAF engineer said. “That’s the real shame. We got to a place where we had a really good foundation, and we could have really run with it.”
Last fall, before the league launched, co-founder Charlie Ebersol said that “One of the things we’re building is a football league, but on the other side, we’re building a technology company.” The second AAF engineer said he didn’t believe Dundon had ever visited the league’s technology office in San Francisco and that he did not appear interested in that part of the operation. After the AAF closed shop, the league issued a long statement that offered few future details other than mentioning an inability to comment further due to “ongoing legal processes.”
Some who had heard the league’s preseason presentations said the technology had been billed higher than its football. The caliber of talent working on the AAF’s digital initiatives generally outpaced the skill level on the field.
“They were spinning it as this technology company that happened to have a football league,” said IsoLynx founder Doug DeAngelis, whose company provided the ultra-wideband wearable devices used by the AAF.
The first AAF engineer agreed with that tech-first characterization of the league. “That’s 100 percent true,” he said.
The league’s innovative app had a predictive algorithm that drew on a variety of data sources and could compute probabilities as to whether a play would be a pass or run, and in which direction it would go. Data from wearable devices on the field—two worn by each player, one located in each football—transmitted to the cloud and then to the app in much less than half a second.
Those tags, created by IsoLynx, were designed to send location and movement information while reserving some bandwidth to transmit data collected from connected bluetooth devices. IsoLynx president Ed Evansen said the AAF had athletes wear heart rate monitors in trials but not in games this first season.
“Basically, we’re just pointing a data firehose at them,” DeAngelis said, noting that IsoLynx’s involvement in the AAF technology ecosystem “stops at the other end of the firehose.”
According to the second engineer, the AAF didn’t use any of the existing network infrastructure in its eight league stadiums, opting instead to lay original wiring. That engineer added that the league collaborated with AT&T on establishing clean, direct lines from stadiums to the internet. The driving force was to reduce latency as much as possible with an eye toward powering in-play sports betting.
In the early weeks of the season, MGM Resorts president of interactive games Scott Butera said, “We really were in it for the technology. They have a technology that’s eliminated latency. If you actually watch the game in the app, you see the play before it happens on TV.”
The league had also built out its own video-streaming hardware, according to the second AAF engineer. The league’s media deals included carve-outs for the ability to stream live video in the app, typically sourced from an overhead camera angle, the Low SkyCam. This feed didn’t include broadcast graphics, so the engineering team wrote code that synced the near real-time data feed with the slower video feed. In the latest iteration of the app, the scoreline at the bottom of the screen was interactive—users could tap it to get custom stats.
“When you can start to target data and tie it to video, it opens up an awful lot of opportunities there,” the first engineer said.
While those on the outside are left piecing together what happens next with the AAF and its technology, the same may be true for those on the inside. What was becoming a highly regarded fan engagement experience could struggle to live on beyond the league’s demise.
“It wasn’t that we had new ideas,” the first engineer said. “It’s that we had better execution.”