[pyrophane]

Now, I have to preface this by saying that I don't know much about football and even less about coaching it, but I wonder how much of this speaks to a lack of a real need for a technology solution for coaches. If it were providing a lot of value to them, I imagine they'd have a harder giving it up.

This NFL suggests that there is such a need: "Since Microsoft has been a partner of the N.F.L. and implemented their technology on our sidelines, the efficiency and speed of communication between coaches has greatly increased."

But of course, that is the NFL speaking about a partner's product, so I can't imagine them saying anything else.

[ovulator]

I'm sure there is huge value to coaches. Pull up our list of plays for 4th and one in the redzone. That list then shows immediately what personnel are best for it and who of those personnel may be out of the game right now.

QB just threw an interception, lets look over the play that just happened to see what he overlooked and how we can adjust.

The problem with technology in this case, is that there is no room for error. You have 40 seconds to call the next play, if you swipe wrong, something crashes you don't call a time out to call IT, you are just fucked. So 100% reliability will trump convenience, no software or hardware is 100% reliable.

[jlv2]

I suspect what makes someone a good coach is that they already know to a high degree what personnel are best for a particular situation on the field, and don't need some algorithm to pick for them.

[hackuser]

That's a really good point. Experts have much different needs than other users, because much of the knowledge is available via a much faster system better integrated with their thinking (their memory).

I wonder what experts would actually want out of a sideline tablet system.

[jewbacca]

I think the "what play should we run"/"what personnel should we use" stuff is probably totally internalized, between the head coach, the offensive/defensive coordinators, and all the positional coaches.

The primary use of the tablets is to consume and analyze new information generated during the game.

But, practically, due to NFL rules, the only thing that the tablets are allowed to do is display still photos of past plays. [0] They've replaced B+W printouts of photos in this role.

Coaches can get the photos faster on the tablets than with the printouts, which can be a huge advantage. But if the system is unreliable, then they might get them slower, or not at all, and waste valuable cognitive capacity on the fucking goddamn malfunctioning tech that is keeping critical information from them in massively time-sensitive situations.

That I think is what's happening with Belichick here. He's notorious for preferring reliability over almost all other considerations. Though I imagine that if full replay video were allowed, it might have gone further before hitting his "fuck this" point.

Also note that there are also team staff (often the offensive/defensive coordinators -- the 2nd level of command, immediately after the head coach) in booths up above the field, with (I think) no technological restrictions, in radio communication with the sideline staff.

---

[0] http://www.sbnation.com/nfl/2016/5/24/11715128/nfl-competiti...

For an illustration of what all this "analyzing past plays" stuff actually means in the context of football:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3ASyQwLNAQ&t=5m30s

[trynewideas]

Per Belichick, the experiment was to deliver portable video to the sideline. Per the NFL, the tablets allowed coaches to quickly queue, annotate, and loop game video play-by-play, as commentators and producers can do in the broadcast booth.

[pwthornton]

Coaches are extremely limited in what they are allowed to do with electronic communication on the sideline. They use the tablets exclusively for viewing aerial images from the last drive.

"The tablets only allow access to a Sideline Viewing System app that provides the photos of recent plays."

http://www.geekwire.com/2014/heres-nfl-players-coaches-use-m...

The NFL used to print out these photos and coaches would go over them on the sidelines. The Surface is supposed to be much faster for this and allow for some other functionality. Usually the offensive coach and his starters are looking at the images while the defense is on the field and vice versa.

The NFL does not allow coaches to use laptops to perform this kind of data analysis live during games.

[kleinsch]

The scenarios you list are valuable, but they have old school paper based ways to do both of those. That's what Belichick is rolling back to.

[dhimes]

And old-school computers in the booth. Just not tablets on the sidelines.

[spaceisballer]

They probably implemented it with no real need. I'm sure some coaches appreciate it. But really I'm sure MS wants them used on the sidelines so they are on TV so they can advertise the tablets.

[gertef]

Remember when they were new and the TV announcers were paid to say "check out those Microsoft Surface tablets" and the coaches were just using them as iPad holders?

[greedo]

$400 million reasons...

[yk]

Belichick is considered the best coach in football of the last twenty odd years, so he has probably his process with pen and paper nailed down. And the thing is, new technology requires a learning curve both individually and also on a larger scale culturally, so I would guess that tablets after a year or so of use would provide a lot of value, however they do not do so now.

[mikestew]

From my reading, the learning curve has nothing to do with it. Belichick's complaint seems to me to be that the shit just doesn't work reliably. It's not a "training issue" or "user education" issue. It's a "go back to your cave and don't emerge until you're confident that this works reliably under all user circumstances". It's a "the head coach of a football team shouldn't have to troubleshoot connection issues" issue.

[coleca]

Reminds me of a story I heard during a project management class many years ago. The PM was working on a govt contract for the US Army in the late 90s to build a mobile mapping system for use in the field on the Humvees. He got all the specs from the generals to build this marvel of a technology system with screens and scrolling maps (90s remember) and decided to talk to the soldiers in the field to ask them what they wanted out of the project.

The soldiers told him what they really wanted was a piece of plywood that they could fold out and lay their paper maps on. They didn't want screens or electronics, because those don't work with bullet holes in them, but the paper maps work fine even if they get shot.

[8_hours_ago]

This kind of stuff still happens all the time today. A few years ago I worked for a small government contractor which did a lot of phase 1 and 2 projects for the DoD. Most of the contracts we got were for developing experimental technologies to make soldiers more effective, which involved a lot of guessing what the soldiers actually wanted. After making a shiny demo (usually held together with duct tape, ugly perl scripts, and prayers) which the government PM would fall in love with, we would do field testing which would inevitably end with the soldiers reporting that it was a cool piece of technology, but almost completely useless to them. Anyway, it was lots of fun to work on those projects :)

[hackuser]

> Belichick is considered the best coach in football of the last twenty odd years ...

Many think he's the best ever and his greatest strength is considered to be preparation, especially knowing his opponent in great detail and preparing his team for their strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies. He is also very flexible in how he does things, adopting very different strategies from week to week.

IMHO he would seem to be a great candidate for a technology that provides up-to-date video of his opponents if it offered some benefits.

[PKop]

It is against the rules to watch video replays on the sidelines of the current game.

These tablet solutions are simply showing photos, which is replacing the paper version of printing out photos.

I can understand why a complicated tech solution that doesn't work reliably 100% of the time is essentially useless compared to a 100% reliable printed picture, solving the same use case.

[trynewideas]

Per Belichick, the NFL was experimenting with video on the sidelines.

[PKop]

Was that mentioned in this article? I don't see it. So his tablet use currently was for still photo viewing.

Here[0], we see that experimentation with video has only occurred during preseason games. So, in the games that actually matter, video is still currently outlawed, as it has been forever.

[0] http://www.sbnation.com/nfl/2016/5/24/11715128/nfl-competiti...

[VLM]

I have a lot of experience automating systems and I would guess the opposite.

There's a lot of money lying on the table such that processes and systems are already going to be running on the border of human comprehension... can I see the signal in this noise?

Meanwhile projects that do something new tend to be successful and profitable, but mere reimplementation digitally tends to result in BS being added to the process as noise until the signal to noise ratio has dropped once again to what was, after all, acceptable before automation. "Well now you got all the time in the world to really stick it to the XYZ department so here's the new requirements" then they fire back causing lower productivity that if nothing were tried to begin with.

You have to realize automation is old, and our ancestors were ignorant not stupid. If you could increase the odds of winning a game by 5% using a million bucks of IBM 7094 mainframes and a million LoC in COBOL then gramps would have done it and made a profit to boot and maybe you can make a couple dimes by modernizing the hardware, but I assure you the algorithms and constraints are baked into the business logic cake and the win/loss percentage won't change.

One way to automate that does succeed is fixing something mgmt didn't realize is broken. I never knew there was a way to do that. I never knew we as a company blew X thousand labor-hours per week on hidden task Y.

IF football never tried statistics and record keeping, then a new system probably using contemporary tablets could really rock. But this isn't the case.

A good, although semi-controversial example, is moving from verbally asking for records over the radio to mobile data terminals to whatever cops use now (probably "cop space app" on their phones or something) has many effects, some even good, but catching criminals isn't one. Fundamentally you've changed who spends five minutes dorking around looking for warrants and dramatically changed how they spend those five minutes, but you haven't really changed anything in terms of end results, although intermediate metrics can be gamed (like dispatcher labor hour minimization).

Tablets make very poor band-aids.

[bsder]

> If you could increase the odds of winning a game by 5% using a million bucks of IBM 7094 mainframes and a million LoC in COBOL then gramps would have done it and made a profit to boot and maybe you can make a couple dimes by modernizing the hardware, but I assure you the algorithms and constraints are baked into the business logic cake and the win/loss percentage won't change.

"Moneyball" demonstrates that your assumption is incorrect.

In addition, you have to collect data, first, before you can analyze it. The limitation blocking "Moneyball" from happening was the fact that the statistics didn't exist for a long time.

Several of my friends were among the people who originally helped Bill James by scoring all the games they went to and then sending the papers in the mail.

Sometimes, something really does require "one clever person" in order to put it all together.

[nhangen]

Surface tablets have been in use for at least a few years, maybe 3-5.

[s3r3nity]

My read of it is that there are absolutely a lot of problems that tablets/electronic devices could solve on the sidelines of an NFL game. However, the urgency and real-time nature of football such that a lot of money and careers can be made/destroyed by a single game, any/all bugs are immediately seen as a significant hinderance.