Texas Tech football head coach Kliff Kingsbury is already a big believer in virtual reality, one of the hottest trends in college football and a resource that he recently called a “must have.”
VICE in partnership with Samsung explored the Red Raiders’ use of virtual reality technology during fall camp along with the current regular season in the short-film documentary “Chasing Perfection” that will air on VICELAND on Oct. 4.
“When we started working with Samsung on Chasing Perfection, we wanted to explore how virtual reality could change football in ways that weren’t previously possible,” said Trent Rohner, Associate Creative Director at VICE: Right now there is huge potential for VR to improve training while mitigating the risk of injuries at the same time.”
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According to Derek Belch, CEO of STRIVR Labs, working with Texas Tech was an opportunity he and his senior leadership team “actively pursued,” mainly because of Kingsbury and his team’s buy-in with the emerging technology. The company currently counts as clients other Division I football programs, including Stanford, Arkansas and Kansas State.
“You have your top tier programs that get a lot of the five-star, big-time players, and if you’re not getting all of those guys, you’d better find advantages elsewhere,” Kingsbury said in the documentary. “Virtual reality has helped us dramatically.”
Virtual reality, which helps simulate game-like situations without the risk of getting injured, has paid positive dividends for Texas Tech junior quarterback Patrick Mahomes II. Through the first four weeks of this season, the Heisman Trophy contender ranks in the top five across the FBS in passing yards (1,493), touchdowns (14), completion percentage (71.2) and passer rating (198.2).
“My entire life, I’ve always searched for how to simulate playing the position of quarterback,” Kingsbury said. “You can throw, you can work out, but you can’t simulate that. You don’t have 21 other guys. Virtual reality is the closest thing you can do to playing the position. That’s huge. Patrick is operating at an incredibly high level compared to last year, and a lot of it’s due to virtual reality.”