Ah, the Dallas Cowboys. A globally known staple of Americanism, Big D is perhaps most famous for their once rigid Doomsday Defense, their former success under the legendary Tom Landry; and before this surprise season, their recent curse of mediocre 8-8 finishes. On a brighter note, the one star that never seems to fade in Dallas is the cheerleading team, which always manage to field a top ten squad.
Unlike popular belief, the term America’s Team was not vainly coined in East Texas, but on a 1978 NFL Films highlight reel by NFL historian Bob Ryan. While decades of winning and sold-out stadiums may have laid the foundation of this sacred moniker, it was, ultimately, the technology of the time that redefined the national image of the Cowboys. Innovators both on the field and off, the Cowboys popularized the classic 4-3 defensive scheme, and were among the first teams to use computer scouting and instant replay.
In modern times, the Cowboys appear to be succeeding in technological areas even more than the gridiron. The 4-3 defense has been solved for years, and Tony Romo has yet to release his inner Troy Aikman, but Owner Jerry Jones is making sure the Cowboys faithful at AT&T Stadium, and around the U.S., receive the kingly treatment fit for America’s most notable fans.
Inside Jerry World, Dallas-based AT&T never seems to halt the expansion of an already massive wireless network. The facility now has a cellular network equivalent to 11 individual cell sites, tripling in capability since its inception as Cowboys Stadium in 2009.
The heart of this colossal cell grid is a distributed antenna system (DAS), which, as opposed to a singular antenna system, utilizes multiple antennas of weaker strength to cover a designated area. Increasing the number of antennas reduces the stress placed on each antenna and increases overall reliability.
Given the size and capacity of the Cowboys’ home stadium, widespread access and reliability are key to appeasing the thousands of fans who despise service blackouts during games. According to the Vice President of AT&T’s Antenna Solutions Group, Chad Townes, a typical Sunday in Arlington generates approximately the same amount of wireless traffic exhibited during Super Bowl XLVII at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans.
Wi-Fi in the stadium has also increased in the past year. A recent addition of 500 new Wi-Fi access points brings the stadium’s grand total to a whopping 1,500–enough to provide wireless internet to the entire suburb of Mckinney, Texas. At one point during their annual Thanksgiving Day game, roughly 19,000 people were connected to the stadium’s Wi-Fi network, and more than 32,000 total fans joined over the course of the game.
For fans who wish to connect on an even deeper level now have the option to download the AT&T Stadium App, available on iOS and Android platforms. The app will consist of an event board to post photos from your experience, polls, quizzes and other fan engagement features. More interestingly, will be the application’s “unite this house” component. Fans using the stadium app will find their mobile devices strobing and flashing in unison, with the tens of thousands of other app users. In other words, this is technology’s response to the Terrible Towel and other stadium quirks.
The combination of the extensive DAS and numerous Wi-Fi points makes AT&T Stadium one of the premier venues for mobile devices in the NFL. For AT&T, the stadium in Dallas is just one jewel in their crown of stadium naming rights. AT&T possesses naming rights to three other major sporting arenas as well, including AT&T Center in San Antonio, AT&T Park in San Francisco, and Texas Tech’s Jones AT&T Stadium.
The Cowboys excel in the digital world as well. With over 8.1 million Facebook “likes,” they lead the second place Pittsburgh Steelers by nearly 1.8 million. In the Twitter-sphere, only New England Patriots’ follower count barely surpasses that of the Cowboy’s 1 million followers. Social media analytics company, Unmetric, recently created their own social media power rankings based on total likes, followers, growth, engagement, number of posts, replies, and speed of replies. Unsurprisingly, the Cowboys finished first in the league with a cumulative Unmetric score of 96, followed by the Green Bay Packers and the Steelers.
As mentioned in SportTechie’s Cowboys Tech Report from last season, the Dallas franchise has forged a partnership with Australia-based, sports science company Catapult Sports to limit injuries and enhance player performance. Similar to GPSports Systems, Catapult Sports offers teams wearable, GPS-tracking devices that record individual player data, such as heart rate, acceleration, deceleration, speed, and distance traveled.
The amount of data recorded by these devices grows with each passing season, and allows strength and conditioning coaches to analyze player workload, fitness, and overall performance; thus, it will be apparent when players are being overworked, at risk for soft tissue injury, and more.
What separates Catapult Sports equipment from the GPS on your car dashboard is IMA, inertial movement analysis. While other GPS player-tracking systems only use a combination of inertial sensors, such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers to monitor movement and force, IMA uses a scientific algorithm to give you data relative to a specific athlete.
Using advanced Kalman filtering, IMA removes the force of gravity from the equation that may confuse an ordinary tracking device. In this way, Catapult Sports devices can accurately monitor an athlete’s unique capabilities better than their competition.
One major tech aspect of the Cowboys franchise that may not receive equal attention as their massive video boards or unprecedented wireless network is their reliance on Tableau Software. Tableau Software is a Seattle-based, business intelligence company that specializes in data visualization.
Founded in 2003 by Chris Stolte, Christian Chabot, and Pat Hanrahan, a founding member of Pixar, Tableau presents business data in easy to use, interactive graphic images. Essentially, Tableau Software saves you the time and hassle of searching and organizing complex data sets, so you can move on to more important projects in a timely manner.
“Before Tableau, we were so segmented, and we couldn’t get the right answers when we needed them. For the first time in 14 years, our people can see real-time data and maneuver it the way they want it to,” stated Bill Priakos, Cowboys’s President of Merchandising.
“I remember the day Tableau presented my information to me in the Tableau form, and I leaned over to our IT staff and I said, ‘you did it, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.’”
With over 17,000 clients ranging from Apple to Facebook to Tessla Motors, Tableau has found itself competing with longstanding computer science juggernauts IBM and Oracle. In the era of technological revolution, data can frequently overwhelm companies and organizations that fail to manage it correctly. To eliminate those frustrations and simplify analytics problems, there is Tableau Software.
We will find out today if America’s Team can start down the path to return to its ways of perpetual NFL dominance, but the revenue and influence that comes with the Cowboys brand is undoubtedly here to stay. As long as the money continues to roll in, Jerry Jones and the rest of the administration will continue to thrust Big D into the 21st century of technology.