When potential #1 overall NFL draft pick Sam Darnold was training last summer, his coach Jordan Palmer noticed he’d developed an elongated throwing motion on longer passes and was wasting time and energy. Deploying a Wilson football with undetectable sensors, Palmer and Darnold evaluated alternative throwing motions for long passes and were able to come up with a quicker and more efficient pass that didn’t affect ball speed, launch angle or spin rate.
Darnold and Palmer were using the original Wilson X Connected Football, which launched as a consumer device in 2016. It tracks basic data about ball speed, spin rate, spiral accuracy, distance, and whether the pass was caught or dropped by the receiver.
“What we were able to do is measure a bunch of throws back-to-back,” said Palmer. “We were able to use the data and realize that he wasn’t gaining any better spin, he wasn’t getting any more velocity, he didn’t have any better spiral efficiency. What was happening was he was elongating his throwing motion for essentially nothing.”
Following input from Darnold, Wilson began developing a more advanced version of the Wilson X smart ball with higher-caliber sensors. The company is now gearing up to launch a new product later in 2018, a more elite connected football called the Wilson Connected Football System that’ll be targeted at NFL teams and rising pros and marketed as a supplementary tool for film sessions.
The new Wilson ball will include all the features of the original Wilson X but add timing data about throws, such as time of flight, time of release and the time of a snap, as well as upgraded algorithms and more granular statistical analyses that’ll help quarterbacks develop more efficient passing techniques. Coaches can then use this data to draw more detailed conclusions about particular plays, such as exactly how long it took the ball to travel between the snap and a receiver.
“With the first one, launched from the consumer standpoint, we wanted to have a fun backyard experience and bring the game to life through a fan’s mobile device,” said Wilson Labs Engineer Dan Hare. “Moving forward, we wanted to be able to target the elite athlete too.”
With the Wilson X, fans were sent live feedback via bluetooth to their mobile devices. The Wilson Connected Football System is meant to last an entire practice and its data downloaded at a later time in the locker room for athletes and coaches to view together or individually with game and practice video.
“For so long coaches have been limited to coaching based off just what they see. Now with the tape mirroring up with the numbers, it’s a completely revolutionary way to be able to evaluate and help guys get better,” said Palmer. “There’s always that balance between perception and reality. And in this case, perception is what the coach thinks is happening or the way that he thinks it should be done, and the reality is what the numbers and what the tape says. Wilson’s now allowing us to be able to separate those two things and make a definitive reason for why we want certain mechanics and why we get the results that we get.”
While the new connected football system is still in the development stage, Hare said a “handful of different” NFL teams have expressed interest in using the ball during practice. A number of pro and collegiate athletes have already tested the product and provided user feedback, which Hare said has enabled Wilson to build out an experience based off their performance demands.
SportTechie Takeaway
This elite fleet of smart balls would complement the Zebra chips that many teams already have embedded in practice jerseys, providing an overall picture of athletes on the field and granular statistics about their snap, pass and catch mechanics.
As of the middle of the last NFL season, Zebra chips were embedded in the practice jerseys of a third of NFL teams, including those of the Los Angeles Rams and New Orleans Saints, which reported using Zebra’s player-tracking technology to manage players, make determinations about their level of fatigue and potential for injury, and compare and contrast practice and game-day performance.
Chips are now used league-wide in uniformed players’ shoulder pads and game balls, which teams are beginning to use alongside global league-wide tracking data sets provided as weekly updates to teams by NFL.com, to make tweaks to the game-day performance and strategy.
This season, the NFL is working with Amazon Web Services to uncover new ways of visualizing the game-day data collected by Zebra chips. The data already fuels the NFL’s Next Gen Stats platform, but the league says it plans to use the increased processing power provided by AWS to develop deeper insights and offer a broader range of statistics involving real-time location, speed and acceleration data, such as a receiver’s ability to get open and an offensive line’s ability to protect the quarterback.
The updated Wilson ball would serve as an additional tool for coaches to compare and contrast game-day performance with practice. Ideally, teams using both Zebra chips in practice jerseys and the Wilson Connected Football System would be able to receive a breakdown of the way athletes are moving around the field during practice (Zebra), as well as the way they’re handling the ball (Wilson).