Here are the top seven technology areas that impacted the NFL this season:
1. Football tracking
In the fourth year of its five-year deal with the NFL, Zebra Technologies was able to place in tracking chips in all game balls. That enables the gathering of data including the velocity and rotation rate of the football.
Pollard said the league was evaluating and studying the data coming from footballs and that fans could soon have access to it.
“I would expect us to see a decent set of more information available this coming season,” Pollard said. “We’d hope — the decision lies with the NFL — that the ball data itself will be published. When we published ball data from the Senior Bowl this past week, there was tremendous interest both from the evaluators’ perspective and also fans and media alike.”
“I went over to this, and I’ve taken some of the same hits. I’ve hit the ground harder. I’ve been hit in the head a lot harder. And the way this helmet absorbs it is fantastic,” Detroit Lions receiver Golden Tate told Tiki and Tierney last week. “So I’m like getting hit and I’m like, ‘Crap, I just got hit hard,’ but I feel OK.
“Obviously with CTE and head injuries, we’re trying to protect our heads because when it’s all said and done — our athleticism goes away, our sight, our backs — but our minds we want to keep.”
Amazon paid the NFL handsomely for the digital rights to stream 11 Thursday Night Football games one season after Twitter got to do so.
There was a paywall, as Prime Video membership was needed to access the streams. But Amazon finished the season noting that it beat Twitter when it came to average-minute audience for at least 30 seconds with more than 310,000 viewers.
NBC is providing mobile streaming of Sunday Night Football games beginning next season, and FOX Sports announced last week after winning the broadcast rights to Thursday Night Football that it would be able to distribute TNF and Sunday games to subscribers on mobile phones for the first time.
Verizon’s deal also brought the streaming of the playoffs and Super Bowl to Yahoo Sports.
Today’s rundown: 1:00pm ET → Pregame Show 6:00pm ET → Coverage begins 6:30pm ET → Kickoff *Halftime Show* 10:00pm ET → Postgame Show pic.twitter.com/GtomeC8LK0
The first Madden NFL Club Championship concluded with the champion competitive Madden player representing the Washington Redskins to take home $35,000 and receive Super Bowl LII tickets.
This was the first year in which the NFL held a season-long competition that included every team, as casual gamers were encouraged to rep their favorite teams for the chance to show off their skills and win prizes. The final round was broadcast on ESPN’s family of networks, marking the start of a multi-year agreement to have competitive Madden broadcasts.
Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta opened its doors to Falcons fans, engaging them with a gigantic video board that was a sight to see and much, much more.
Inside the eight more NFL stadiums this season, Intel installed 38 5K ultrahigh-definition cameras each so that fans would have access to 360-degree highlights.
And outside of Levi’s Stadium and MetLife Stadium, San Francisco 49ers and New York Jets fans were able to use biometric scanning to expedite their way into venues thanks to team partnerships with IdentoGO by IDEMIA.
7. Facebook
Not only did the NFL partner with Facebook to bring NFL Films content to the Facebook Watch platform, but also players were very receptive in being the subjects of episodic shows on Watch.
The most prominent of them — Tom vs Time — featured Patriots quarterback Tom Brady chasing another championship at age 40, with episodes running as the team advanced all the way to the Super Bowl. The shows drew headlines, provided behind-the-scenes access for fans into Brady’s life and unique training methods, and even led to controversy as well.
“I was very surprised when he was doing this thing,” Patriots receiver Julian Edelman said at a Facebook event last week, according to the Boston Globe. “I can remember vividly in 2009, when I was a rookie. I’m a millennial and I was over there on Facebook, and every time [Brady] would walk by, he’d be, like, ‘Get off your phone! Get in your playbook!’”
