It’s one thing to hope that your video chat for a virtual work happy hour connects seamlessly, it’s quite another to rely on the technology as a professional football team making a selection in the NFL Draft.
But that’s what 32 teams did last week when they used Microsoft Teams, the tech giant’s collaboration platform, as part of the league’s tech-heavy, first-ever virtual Draft.
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In line with its ongoing partnership with the NFL, in which Microsoft has supplied Surface tablets as sideline technology since 2013, the company and the league are now doing more to integrate Teams.
Over the course of the three-day Draft — a highly anticipated event for sports-starved fans during the COVID-19 pandemic — Teams was used to assist with all communication between the NFL and its clubs looking to make player selections.
Microsoft was just one company whose technology was used to pull off the event. Amazon Web Services provided hosting and video feed management; Verizon provided phones and connectivity for remote locations; and Bose provided headphones to all participants.
Yusuf Mehdi is a big NFL fan who happens to be a corporate vice president for Modern Life, Search and Devices at Microsoft. In a Teams call this week, he sported a Seattle Seahawks shirt as he switched his background to an image of the team’s home, CenturyLink Field.
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Mehdi watched the Draft with his two sons and said he enjoyed the escape from the heaviness of the ongoing health crisis. He wasn’t alone. The NFL established new viewership records for the event, with an average audience of over 8.4 million viewers watching all three days.
Mehdi cited three reasons why he thought Microsoft Teams was well suited to make the Draft a success:
- Ease of use: “When you’re about to drop a whole new technology solution on a bunch of coaches and players — some of them love technology, some of them maybe don’t want to lean into technology — you need to have something that people can pick up and use right away and be easy. That was a huge thing,” Mehdi said.
- Security: “With a lot of these video conferencing solutions, you’ve heard critiques and cases where people drop in accidentally to other people’s calls. Let’s be honest, software is always a challenge. But the nice thing about Teams is we do an excellent job of security because of the fact that we run it for so many enterprise accounts.”
- More than video chat: “One of the really powerful things about teams is it’s not just a video chatting solution, it is a very robust collaboration platform. You’re able to obviously have Teams channels, you’re able to have group collaboration and it’s even a platform for development. People can write and create solutions on top.”
On that last point, Mehdi said each NFL team was able to have a private channel to communicate among themselves and with the NFL. A special form was used to make a player selection and it was timestamped to make sure everything adhered to the “on the clock” nature of the Draft.
In its own blog post about the behind-the-scenes activity, Microsoft said a tool called Power Automate would automatically post the selection on the private “Head Table” channel and simultaneously relay it to Commissioner Roger Goodell’s Surface tablet so the pick could be transferred to a paper card and announced for the TV audience.
It’s all a new wrinkle for a sports world in which Surface tablets have become as familiar on the sidelines as some of the coaches and players who use the devices — whether they’re tossing them on the ground or swiping through plays in unique ways.
“We want to be a part of the game, right?” Mehdi said. “We don’t want to be like a banner that’s up on a stadium wall. We want our tech to be so emotional that people grab it and use it.”
And Mehdi is optimistic and hopeful that the NFL — and Microsoft’s tech — will be back in action, not just virtually, later this year. But the company is prepared to help however it can.
“They made all these draft picks, now they have to help get all these players on board and say, ‘OK, what are our plays? How do we come together?'” Mehdi said. “The ability for our technology to help with that, whether it’s the Surface device or Teams or anything else, we’re going to play a big role.”