National Football League Beginning to Embrace the IPad

If ever there was an organization that could benefit from using an iPad, it's the NFL. Anyone who has ever watched a game has seen players and coaches staring intently at black and white photographs of plays that have just been run to see what might be done better next time. Those photographs are taken by team photographers who then have to print them off and distribute to the right players or coaches. Now, it appears that is all about to change and Wired Magazine has done an investigative report to find out just how pervasive iPad use is in the NFL, and what the devices are being used for.

After speaking with officials from most of the 32 NFL teams, it turns out that most teams are using them to replace DVDs rather than clipboards. Just as teams have still photographers that capture key moments in games, they also have video recorders that sit high above the action capturing all of the players on the field at once as each play is executed. These videos have traditionally been burned onto DVDs and distributed to players and coaches after games for study. Thus, the mental image many fans have of players or coaches studying game tape in a dark room with a projector are long gone. Until recently, players used laptops to view the replays, which allowed them to follow the action of any other player. Thus, the DVD's could be used to analyze their own performance or to do so for a team they will be playing next.

Now however, that's all changing. Instead of burning to DVD, videographers simply upload video to a cloud app such as DropBox, and players and coaches retrieve them for viewing on their iPad. But that's not all of course, it's just the beginning.

Some teams, though they are loathe to admit it lest an opponent get wind of an opportunity, also load their playbooks onto cloud apps so that players can access them anywhere at any time. Doing so allows coaches to make changes that are instantly available to everyone involved.

In addition to using an iPad to keep abreast of how a team or player or opponent is performing, the iPad also allows for the access of historical data. Imagine a quarterback being able to pull up statistics during a game on a particular defensive end who has just entered the game due to injury to the starter. Or a coach creating on the fly pie charts that list the statistical probability of a certain plays being called by the opposing coach under certain situations. It's all coming, even if it's a slow process. It won't be long before we see players with iPads in their hands on the sidelines, instead of black and white paper photographs.