Football’s Big Blue (SciTech)

One of George Carlin’s most famous routines (man, he had a lot of those) was the comparison of football to baseball, “Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game.  Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.”

And some of the most recent technological advances in football are proving how right Carlin is–not that it needs to be proven.

In an effort to close a growing technological gap between players and coaches, especially on the collegiate level, a growing number of services are gaining traction in the football world to try and incorporate this whole Internet thingy into the gridiron.

Coaches are beginning to use a website called OnePlaybook to help manage their teams by posting announcements, game video and updated practice schedules.

OnePlaybook works like a private social networking site (great, another one?) or other academically-based sites like Blackboard where teachers can post syllabi and due dates for classes, affording many teachers the luxury of not pitying students who aren’t responsible enough to check it and turn assignments in on time.

It also saves paper.  Sweet.

Another company, XOS Technologies, has teamed up with EA Sports to provide coaches and players with an action simulator, as reported by ABC News, allowing players to “review specific plays in a simulator modeled after the popular video game ‘Madden.’”

And then, there’s ZEUS.  This one is the problem; or at least, people are fighting its principle on principle.

ZEUS is football’s answer to Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer of the late 1990’s.  According to their Website, ZEUS is developed by EndGame Technologies (not the most uplifting name) and is essentially a program powerful enough to “simulate the equivalent of every game played in the history of the NFL in a matter of seconds,” and can also “objectively assess critical play-calling decisions with startling accuracy and confidence.”

Translation: everyone’s a critic, and now computers are too.

The creators of ZEUS say it can help coaches decide whether or not to go for it on 4th and long or help calculate the odds on whether or not that two-point conversion is a bad idea.  But ZEUS also has the ability to–and here’s the rub–prove the most talented and famous NFL head coaches wrong.

That’s some risky business, Jack.  Try putting that one past Ditka and see what happens to your face.

We don’t need a machine to call out the boneheaded moves coaches and players can and will continue to make in the NFL.  We’ve got an army of analysts and commentators for that, and trust me, players and coaches are already annoyed enough.

Technology should do everything it can to help advance, support and innovate a game as cherished in this country as football, but we don’t need a computer to sit there like a Vulcan on the sidelines and tell a coach how illogical it is for Brett Favre to take such a huge risk by making such an ill-advised pass that actually ended up working.

That sort of thing is called “fun.”  It’s why we play, and why we watch.

And if past experiences have anything to tell us about the future, we should already know this is taking technology in sports too far.

The BCS uses a sophisticated computer program to help rank its college teams as well, you know.

And it’s widely agreed to be stupid.

–Joey Alfino, Red Editorial Staff.