Surely the answer to this question is a resounding, “no,” right? Well, not so fast. While technology has undoubtedly helped the league get to where it is today, there is also a major problem in the sport because of what technology is unveiling.
Each offseason we see a handful of players calling it quits and all have made references to brain injuries including CTE. This scare has made parents think twice about allowing their children to play the sport at a young age; a trend the league definitely is not a fan of. While most people associate the advancement of technology with positive outcomes, perhaps the executives sitting in the offices at 345 Park Avenue would disagree. So, what are the pros and cons of furthering the use of technology in the NFL?
Pros
Revenue
The most obvious pro for the NFL has been the revenue they have taken in during their existence as a result of the advancement of television. With the addition of HDTV, NFL RedZone and the ability to access live games almost anywhere from your phone or tablet, the NFL and their TV deals are only becoming more and more lucrative. Currently, the NFL makes about $39.6 billion off of their TV deals. This money is split up between CBS, FOX, ESPN, NBC and the NFL Network and is paid out over the course of 8 years. Last year, the league took in an astounding $7.3 billion. As you can surmise from these numbers, the NFL has directly benefitted from their broadcasting as they reported more than 202 million unique viewers watched their games last season. Clearly, the ability to see the game clearer and more completely than ever using HDTV and satellite TV to watch your favorite team from afar has made watching football more enjoyable for fans and more popular than ever. These advancements over just the last 3 years have done a lot for the NFL and with HD and 4K capabilities on many TVs and the uprising of virtual reality technology, you can be sure the next set of TV deals will only be more mind blowing.
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The Game
While worries about head, knee and internal injuries linger in NFL facilities, the most prominent advancement of technology within an NFL organization is the ability to prepare for your upcoming opponent. In the past, scouts would visit the games of the upcoming team and watch their schemes, formations and plays to help tip off the team’s coaching staff of any and all things they see. They would also use grainy footage from TV broadcasts to help rewatch, pause and rewind game film. While this still happens in the league, it is much more efficient and effective to use game film from the NFL’s All-22 collection in which each team has access. This All-22 collection contains wide camera angles of every snap from every game for as far back as the NFL started filming the All-22 style. This footage helps teams be better prepared on game days and therefore puts a more interesting product on the field.
Along the same lines, NFL teams will begin to look into Virtual Reality technology more as the results in some college programs, like Stanford, have been fairly well documented. One of the first NFL teams to bring in these technologies is the Dallas Cowboys as they’ve signed a 2-year deal with STRIVR Labs in order to use their Virtual Reality Programs to better prepare their QBs and other players by putting them in the game rather than just watching the All-22 film.
The advancement of technology to the gameplay in the NFL doesn’t stop there though. In 2014, the NFL signed a $400 millions dollar deal with Microsoft to make the Surface the “Official Tablet of the NFL.” This deal not only paid the NFL big bucks, but it also created a new way to incorporate technology into the game. Now, instead of getting large Polaroid pictures of the last series ran down to the QB and coaches by some intern, the pictures are immediately available to the team via the Microsoft Surfaces which every NFL team has on their sideline. Some players, like Peyton Manning, didn’t immediately mesh well with the “new school” approach and remained faithful to the “Polaroid” method.
Another instance of technology in the game is the Pylon Cam. For the first time last season the NFL installed cameras into all eight Endzone Pylons to help the refs make clearer calls.
Health
Technology has done some amazing things in the world. It has helped people who can’t speak have a voice. It has given us millions of gadgets to help make everyday life easier. It has even given us cars that drive on their own. And while all these things have and will make life easier for us, certainly the advancements in health have been the biggest achievement of technology.
The NFL is no different. It used to be that an ACL injury meant the end of a career. Take Gale Sayers for instance. One of the most fun to watch and explosive players in NFL history had his career stolen from him at age 26. While he played a couple seasons after that, he was just never able to regain strength and agility in his knee. Fast forward to today where Adrian Peterson missed the NFL rushing record by 9 yards less than a year after suffering an even more serious type of ACL/MCL injury.
The difference? Over the last 40 years, new technologies have been developed which help to actually reconstruct the ligaments rather than attempt to repair them. Also, the addition of arthroscopic surgery helped reduce recovery times. The ability to be less invasive through arthroscopy allowed players to move their knees sooner after surgery which helped work the newly constructed ligament and tighten it up. In addition, all this was made possible thanks to the 3-D MRI which gives surgeons the ability to view both sides of the knee and be even more precise. For the NFL, the ability to put their athletes back on the field faster than ever is a huge plus for a league that thrives on their superstars.
Con
Health
While advancements in health technologies is a huge Pro for the NFL, it also can be a big time Con that could eventually crush the league. The recent emergence of head injuries and CTE in current and ex-NFL players has been an overwhelming storyline of each offseason for the past 5 years. Since many ex-NFL players have been affected by CTE (a progressive degenerative disease of the brain which is a result of repetitive brain trauma) many people in the NFL community found themselves asking many questions with few answers. Many of those people were indirectly affected in May of 2012 when NFL Great and Hall of Famer Junior Seau took his own life after suffering from CTE for many years. Those close to Seau were the only ones who knew that he was struggling with symptoms of the disease which made life for him unbearable despite the many prescriptions he was taking. This event certainly opened up much of the league’s eyes, but some eyes remained shut.
While head injuries have always been a part of the game, the relationship between concussions and CTE has made the possibility of head injuries that much scarier for players and with the help of technology, those scary statistics have been brought to the forefront. In the last few years, many groups have taken it upon themselves to basically find out what makes a concussion on the football field and whether or not it is preventable. In 2011, the University of Michigan tracked high school football programs from around the country by using chips inserted into each helmet. These chips were used to track how many hits each player was taking and how hard the hits were. They found that the average high school football player takes 650 impacts to their head each season. They also determined that most concussions happen when a hit comes in above 90g of force.
The university compared that to running head first into a wall at 20 miles per hour. In 2015, the NFL refused the use of similar devices inside player helmets. When asked about this technology, long-time NFL wide receiver Hines Ward showed his worry for the business side of football where teams could use the numbers associated with these tests to help them negotiate more team-friendly contracts. He said he doubted that either NFL or the NFLPA would agree to the use of these and he was right.
Since May 2012, many great NFL players have cut their careers short in fear of finding themselves in the same predicament down the road. After just one Pro Bowl caliber NFL season, ex-49er Chris Borland chose to walk away from the game and his large contract in fear that he may one day suffer from CTE. After doing research on the disease, Borland realized that he was without a doubt a candidate for the disease as he looked back over his long football career through college and high school. He realized that CTE was not only related to the major concussions he had suffered, in which he could only recall a couple, but even more so related to the small impact concussions that one may not even recognize. Many NFL players criticized his “love for the game,” but Borland insists, “If there were no possibility of brain damage, I’d still be playing.” While this seemed odd at first, Borland was just the tip of the iceberg.
That very same offseason saw the early retirements of Patrick Willis, Jason Worlids and Jake Locker; all of which cited future brain injuries as a reason for leaving the game they love so dearly. This past offseason Calvin Johnson, D’Brickashaw Ferguson and AJ Tarpley all retired with no regrets. While the former were both in their 30s with All-Pro careers behind them, the latter was only 23 and once again, just finished his rookie season where he was a spot starter in Buffalo who had made several big time plays in his short time on the field. While Ferguson denies that he retired “because of” CTE, he states in a self written SI article, “I feel a bit betrayed by the people or committees put in place by the league who did not have my best interests at heart.” Ferguson was under the impression that only severe concussions caused the disease and claims he and many other were steered there by NFL officials.
While players are taking this threat very seriously, the NFL and it’s owners don’t seem to feel the same way. One NFL doctor said that the relationship between football and CTE is “over-exaggerated” which prompted Will Smith to make a movie just to show the general public how under exaggerated it actually is. The movie depicts events that the NFL certainly did not want depicted to the vast majority of the population; especially its athletes. Scenes such as forensic pathologist and neurological expert Bennet Omalu meeting with NFL Executives, such as Roger Goodell, to show them his fairly concrete findings on CTE’s connection with the suicides of NFL players like Mike Webster and Dave Duerson. In this scene, as in real life, Omalu was shrugged off and the NFL gave no real thought to the findings even threatening to “come after” Omalu if he persisted.
Luckily, this movie took place in the mid-2000s and thus many of the NFL’s reactions have since been reversed as they have taken several initiatives to fix the ferocity of the game starting at a young age. The NFL has instituted programs like Heads Up Football, a program that teaches young athletes the importance of proper tackling mechanics to lessen the impact on one’s brain.
This is a great program, but is it too late? Better yet, is it dangerous to the future of the sport to attempt to clean it up? Many parents are simply too afraid of the side effects that may arise from playing the sport and this worry has only increased as the NFL admits more and more that there is in fact a connection between serious head trauma and the game of football.
Even ex-players won’t allow their kids to strap on a helmet. 4-time Super Bowl Champion Terry Bradshaw said, “If I had a son today, and I would say this to all our audience and our viewers out there, I would not let him play football.” Ravens and Jets linebacker Bart Scott then echoed Bradshaw’s feelings by stating, “I don’t want my son to play football. I play football so he won’t have to. With what is going on, I don’t know if it’s really worth it.” With all of this uncertainty by parents, is it possible that the NFL won’t have a player pool to pick from in the future?
Conclusion
Will technology kill the NFL? No. It certainly won’t kill the NFL, which at this moment has to be considered the new American Pastime and has one of the broadest reaches of any sport. If anything, there is more reason to believe that the NFL will only continue to grow over the next decade with the help of technology. We’re talking about watching games in 3D, using virtual reality and of course the men who step foot on the field will only continue to be more and more freakishly entertaining.
What the NFL should worry about is the safety of their young fans and the young athletes who hope to one day be like Julio Jones, Patrick Peterson or JJ Watt. The NFL has done a tremendous job attempting to right a wrong and with the help of new technologies and startups like Vicis. I believe the league will help make the game of football safer across the board although completely reducing the risk is impossible.
The league is certainly not sitting idly by though. The NFL has partnered with GE, Under Armour and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create a new initiative called the Head Health Challenge. This challenge, a 5-year project with the focus on accelerating concussion research, diagnosis and treatment, means the NFL is working to move in the right direction. Head trauma from the game is impossible to completely stop and while it will not kill the league by any means, it is likely that each offseason will be filled with young players taking their big contracts and walking away from the game early to protect themselves. Who knows, perhaps a few of this year’s crop of rookies will leave on their own terms before reaching their second year in the NFL.
This article was written by Keegan Green. Discuss the future of technology and the NFL with him on Twitter.