NFL names Verizon Business as new coach-to-coach communication supplier for 2023 season

Verizon

NFL coaches are never without their headsets on the sidelines, a constant companion for communications among a team’s legions of coordinators and assistants.

Reliability is paramount. As Patriots head coach Bill Belichick once quipped about the technology, “When it works, it’s great.” And when it doesn’t, well, coaches are left scrambling.

Beginning with tonight’s opener between the Detroit Lions and Kansas City Chiefs, Verizon Business is the new coach-to-coach communication supplier for all NFL games through its Managed Private Wireless Solution. For this year, it will run on a CBRS radio frequency, but Verizon could implement a 5G alternative in the future.

“We had to really build a robust solution for them,” said Jonathan Nikols, Verizon’s SVP of Global Enterprise, Americas. “We've been deploying this over the past nine months, and it’s ready for primetime.”

Verizon has now installed equipment at all 30 NFL stadiums in advance of this season. Its technology was piloted during the league’s five international games in 2022, spanning the countries of England, Germany and Mexico.

The NFL has an equity rule which states that either both teams can use the headsets or neither. So when the Steelers’ headsets started picking up a Patriots radio broadcast during a Sept. 2015 game, both teams had to power down the communication system until it could be fixed. The private network Verizon is implementing will only allow certain devices to connect to a specified band of spectrum.

Verizon

Nikols said Verizon has endeavored to solve for security, latency, interference and network congestion. In this season, only coach-to-coach communication is shifting under Verizon’s jurisdiction, but player-to-coach play calling and other larger uses in the venue are under consideration for future updates. That could be inclusive of running cashless retail and concessions, facial ticketing and other stadium operations.

“As we are able to continue to expand the technology, the coverage, the penetration, you're going to be able to see more and more applications coming on board that can be siphoned off specifically for quality of service and different types of attributes like that,” Nikols said.

This deployment is part of the broader Verizon Business Connected Venue program. In 2021, Verizon and the NFL began a 10-year agreement in which Verizon became the league’s Official 5G Partner, with the telecom giant upgrading networking infrastructure in and around league stadiums.

Motorola was the supplier and branded sponsor from 1999 through 2012, before the headsets carried only NFL logos in 2013. Bose then introduced its noise-cancelling devices to the league in 2014 and held the marketing sponsorship through 2021. The headsets reverted to NFL markings in 2022 and will keep them this year even as Verizon takes over the partnership.

The devices may all bear the league’s shield, but are more personalized than they appear. Some opt only for a left earpiece, others only right and a few — such as Cowboys offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer and former Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury — have been known to opt for the double earmuff headphones.

Just as personalized are the types of information shared, with Nikols projecting additional use cases in the future. Data transmission from the Zebra RFID tags that power AWS Next Gen Stats is the backbone of advanced analytics and could be secured over a private network down the line.

“We're not party to that today,” he said, “but you can kind of start to think that all of these different types of connected solutions could start being connected to a private network, which enables it to be more secure and more sustainable and put a lot more stuff across that spectrum that can be dedicated to very, very specific solutions.”