Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz is reportedly nearing a return to the field, with Week 3 a “realistic” possibility. Wentz started the Eagles’ first 13 games last year until a torn ACL on Dec. 10 ended his season. In his absence, backup Nick Foles led the team to its first Super Bowl title, defeating the New England Patriots 41-33.
News of Wentz’s imminent return this season came courtesy of a tweet from ESPN’s Chris Mortensen. He reported that Wentz’s “GPS data has hit a vital threshold—ability to protect himself.” Mortensen added that Wentz had not officially been ruled out for Sunday’s Week 2 game.
There is much more optimism inside Eagles organization that Carson Wentz's return is coming sooner than later. Not ruled out this week but week 3 sounds more realistic. His GPS data has hit a vital threshold – ability to protect himself. Only a setback would cool optimism.
— Chris Mortensen (@mortreport) September 9, 2018
Though the report cited GPS data, the underlying technology is almost certainly RFID (radio-frequency identification). The Eagles were an early adopter of Zebra Technologies’ RFID tracking chips at their practice facility in 2014, and a Zebra rep confirmed that installation remained active. About one-third of NFL teams use Zebra in practice.
The Eagles previously used Catapult’s OptimEye GPS system under former head coach Chip Kelly, but a Catapult rep confirmed that had been discontinued. While it’s possible the Eagles might be using both, it’s highly unlikely given such systems would be redundant. RFID locates players and transmits data differently than GPS but accomplishes the same positioning and workload functions. (An Eagles spokesman had not replied to an inquiry by the time this story was published.)
Zebra’s system has the added benefit of including tiny chips embedded in the footballs, allowing those to be tracked as well as players. ESPN reported in August that the Eagles were using tracking data to gauge Wentz’s rehab. Zebra ball data showed that the velocity and accuracy of Wentz’s throws had improved in the nine months he’s been out.
SportTechie Takeaway
The use of tracking data to monitor an athlete’s rehab and guide return-to-play decisions is nothing new but specifics rarely emerge in the public domain. It’s no surprise that the Eagles are tapping into this resource, given their reputation as an analytically-savvy organization. At February’s SportTechie State of the Industry event, president of NFL Players Inc. Ahmad Nassar said he’d heard only two of the 32 NFL teams actually used the Zebra data disseminated by the league.
Asked the identities of the two, Nassar replied with a laugh, “They may have played in the Super Bowl, I don’t know.” That was before the NFL began distributing the entire league-wide data sets to each club—which they’re also starting to do with ball chip data—but the point remains that the Eagles are again ahead of the curve with tech.