It’s been a busy week for sports-tech news, so let’s jump right into it. Here are the stories we found interesting this week.

If you don’t plan on subscribing to NBA League Pass next year, but worry that you really might want to see a random out-of-market game, the NBA has you covered now. You will be able to purchase single games, a la carte, from League Pass starting next season. This is good news! The not-so-good news is that single games will run you $7 a pop. Still, it’s nice to know the feature is available, and it might come in handy for the diehard fans who take a random trip but still want to catch their team’s games.

In a similar, but more stripped-down note, the NFL announced a new video service called Game Pass. Don’t get too excited — you won’t be able to stream regular-season games live with it. You do get to live-stream preseason games, and have access to full replays of past games, for what it’s worth. But that’s kind of it. Replays will be available right after the game ends, and fans can tap any prior game for any team all the way back to 2009. It’s like NFL Rewind, basically, but it will be available on pretty much all your devices.

The EA Sports Hockey League was one of the big missing features from NHL 15, but NHL is bringing it back for 16, and fans can sign up for the public beta to help test it out. Check the last link for all the details, but the skinny is that EASHL is getting a pretty big revamp. In a possible face-saving push, EA is issuing the beta as part of a campaign to involve more user feedback. It’ll be available July 30th if you have NHL 15 for either Xbox One or PS4.

You know how EA’s NCAA Football didn’t use player names, but pretty much copied everything else they could from the player to use in their game without paying the athletes? Well, they got sued for it, and EA shut down production of the game in 2013. Fast-forward to now, and the players won their $60 million settlement. If they file for compensation, they’ll receive some cash. Good job, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken.

Speaking of, NCAA teams might be making a comeback to 2K basketball games soon, though the scope isn’t quite known yet.

Something I didn’t know: Nike has been making the classic Converse Chuck Taylor shoe since 2003. Nike acquired Converse after the former went bankrupt. Hmm, the more you know. Anyway, the Chuck is getting a revamp, but only on the inside. Nike is using some of their shoe tech to make the Chucks more comfortable. Same classic look, more comfortable shoe. Cream on the inside, clean on the outside, if you will.

We talk about GoPros a bit on this site. We also talk about live-streaming apps like Meerkat a lot. So when it’s announced that people can now stream on Meerkat using their GoPros, it seems relevant to our interests.

We recently mentioned how drugs like Adderall were being used as PEDs in eSports. Well, some major eSports leagues are instituting drug testing now. I’m not quite sure how it will work for players with real-world needs for the drugs, but it’s a step in the right direction for those who care about that kind of thing.

Speaking of gaming, popular game-streaming site Twitch is ditching Flash for HTML5. This is good news for anyone who likes stable performance, secure computing, or living in the year 2013.

If you buy Madden NFL 16 for the Xbox One, you’ll get a year of EA Access, which is sort of like Netflix for EA games.

Because it seems there’s always Daily Fantasy Sports news, FanDuel has purchased the company that made their apps, and DraftKings will pay $250 million over the next two years to advertise on ESPN.

That’s all for this week. Enjoy your summer weekend, and be excellent to each other.

The GoPro camera can be used for recording virtually anything, but the original market for the small waterproof shooter was for action sports. GoPro gave surfers, skateboarders, skiers, bikers, bungee jumpers, and all kinds of extreme athletes the ability to easily record (and share) unique views of their sport. Now, we mount them on our cars and our dogs. I mount mine on my golf bag to record driving range sessions. You can find GoPro footage of nearly anything these days, and GoPro is looking to turn the best footage out there into cash for them and the creator.

The newly-launched Premium Content Licensing Portal is GoPro’s take on the Getty licensing model. Essentially, GoPro is selling a service to ad producers, movie makers, journalistic organizations, or anyone else with enough money that will allow them to buy the rights to interesting footage shot on GoPro cameras. The companies pay GoPro, GoPro pays the video makers. It seems like a no-brainer for content producers. As Mashable puts it:

… high-quality original footage is costly and difficult to produce, so advertisers are more than willing to shell out the money to buy licenses. Thanks to the durability of the devices and savvy ties with extreme sporting, GoPro users have created a wealth of first-person action footage that’s hard to get otherwise.

While, at least at the moment, it seems unlikely that GoPro users could use the service as a full-time job, it seems like getting offered some cash for their cool videos would be a win for them, as well. Everyone likes a little extra money, and they’d also get the thrill of possibly seeing their footage on TV or the web. They’re going to do parkour on high buildings or surf giant waves anyway — might as well make a little money off it.

The new service is also an interesting fork in the business model for GoPro. They’ve made a lot of money on their cameras and accessories, and the company is valued at almost $4 billion. But we’re seeing more and more that creating cool hardware isn’t enough. Look at Apple. They’ve sold unseemly amounts of their devices, but as the iterations offer fewer and fewer new features, customers become reluctant to pay for upgrades. The jump from the original iPhone to the iPhone 3GS was huge — much bigger than the jump from the iPhone 5 to the iPhone 6. Apple caught this early, and that’s where the App Store came in. It’s another revenue model built on the backbone of their successful hardware. GoPros are built to last. It’s one of their main selling points, but could also mean a longer window of time between repeat sales. If the hardware market gets too saturated, they have to turn elsewhere for revenue. Now a hardware company is also a media company. It’s not a pivot, it’s diversification.

The site is already up and running, so we may very well see more GoPro footage in our TV and online streaming ads. And since GoPro is acting as the gatekeeper for what’s interesting and engaging, chances are good that the footage we see will be the cream of the crop. It’s a smart move for GoPro. They make a little extra money, and might even convince buyers on the fence to pick up one of their cameras. Whether it works or not, the move shows that GoPro is looking to get ahead of the curve, rather than waiting for camera sales to drop before trying to play catchup.

(Image via chriscom)

Let’s kick the tires and light the fires, it’s the TechGraphs News Roundup. Here are the sports-tech stories we found interesting this week.

In case you somehow missed it, the Los Angeles Clippers and Dallas Mavericks both made serious plays for free-agent center DeAndre Jordan. It got weird. And emoji we involved, for some reason.

We take saving video game progress for granted, but back in the NES days, it was actually pretty special. FTW tells you the details of how you could save your Tecmo Super Bowl domination.

Speaking of video games, OOTP Baseball 16 is on sale! We’re big fans of the game here at TechGraphs. If haven’t gotten your own copy yet, here’s your chance.

Yahoo! is now offering daily fantasy. We previewed it a little on this very site, but expect a more in-depth review soon.

Unofficial friend of the FanGraphs family and overall stats warlock Daren Willman was profiled over at Rolling Stone. Check it out. He’s very modest about creating a sabermetric juggernaut.

Fitness trackers are nice, but don’t forget that’s tracking more than you might realize. Pro tip – leave it at home if you plan on committing a crime.

That’s all for this week. Have a good weekend, and be excellent to each other.

You didn’t seriously expect Yahoo Sports to ignore the daily fantasy boom, did you?

That’s the first line of Yahoo!’s introduction to their newly-announced daily fantasy offering. It’s bluntness leans on the cute side, but it’s now without merit. Daily fantasy sports (DFS) seem to be exploding in popularity, and the funding numbers certainly back that up.

Yahoo! is going up against two well-established DFS platforms — FanDuel and DraftKings. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses, but what they both possess is strong market saturation. FanDuel, especially, has been making a huge push in partnerships of late, teaming up with both Major League Baseball and NASCAR. And it’s become increasingly difficult to watch any kind of sporting event without seeing commercials for either DraftKings or FanDuel. Yahoo! has an uphill climb ahead of them if they plan on making a big dent in the DFS market. But they do have a few aces up their sleeve.

Their first advantage is that that are already a huge player in the fantasy sports market. It’s true that their reputation has taken some hits as of late, but they’re still one of the big providers. Millions of traditional fantasy players are already visiting Yahoo! on a frequent basis. All Yahoo! has to do is entice them to give DFS a try (or seven). Whereas FanDuel or DraftKings have to either pay for advertising or enter in partnerships if they want exposure on the popular fantasy sites. Yahoo! has it all baked right in. They just have to convince people it’s worth a shot.

While it hasn’t been up long enough to do a full review, a quick glance at the new DFS site shows a nice, clean interface. The nuts and bolts of it work much like DraftKings or FanDuel, but Yahoo! is taking a different approach with their salary caps. Instead of working within a $50,000 cap, Yahoo! works within a $200 limit. Of course, everything is prorated. Instead of dropping $9,500 on a top-notch player, Yahoo! users would spend something like $60 within their lower cap limit. This is most likely a stab at simplicity — making the the financials easier to manage across a whole roster. It’s a novel idea, one that separates them from the rest of the field. We’ll have to see how it plays out as the season goes on.

The first game of the NFL season comes on September 10th. The second half of the baseball season is clearly the proving grounds for Yahoo!’s new platform — a time to iron out all the bugs before the real money starts rolling in. Whether it works or not, you have to give Yahoo! credit for trying. DFS is eating into their user base and they’re making a move to try and stop the bleeding. Perhaps they can leverage their place in the market into some higher revenues. They certainly have the foothold. Being valued at $40 billion probably doesn’t hurt, either.

The FanGraphs family took July 3rd off, so the News Roundup is appearing on your screens a little later than usual today. Here are some of the most interesting sports-tech tidbits we found this week.

Valve’s biggest DOTA 2 tournament, known as The International, announced that it will be offering $15 million in prize pool money. A challenging and leveling system being employed means that the total could actually go higher. This is where I would insert some overdone joke about nerds needing to do their hand stretches, but I feel like $15 million is an amount of money that prohibits me from making these comments anymore. Get that money, dorks.

Speaking of gamers, they will now be able to share their favorite frags and long-range, no-scope headshots to mobile YouTube users in their beloved 60fps format. This feature has been available on the desktop for a bit of time, but now anyone with a modern iOS or Android device can enjoy the carnage (or Minecraft videos) in their preferred frame rate.

Kansas City’s Kaufmann Stadium got a major WiFi network upgrade during the end of last season, and just in time to see the baseball club take the World Series to seven games. That postseason traffic proved to be a great test, it seems, and the Royals are seeing the benefits this season. Promotion of the new network is going strong, and new features like a parking payment system have been added.

Dish’s new Sling TV platform showed signs of promise when we saw it at CES, and the potential to be a real disruptor is still there. However, if more major outages keep happening, Dish will start having customer retention issues before their platform is even fully off the ground.

This technically counts as sports-tech news because tennis is a sport and slow-motion video utilizes technology, but I mostly just want to make sure all of you see what really happens to a tennis ball when a racket hits it.

The San Antonio Spurs’ Matt Bonner thinks he gave himself tennis elbow by upgrading to the iPhone 6 Plus. Seriously.

GoPro has announced their newest offering, the Hero 4 Session, and it looks pretty rad. It’s basically a waterproof cube camera that packs many of the features a modern GoPro has, but in a much smaller and lighter package. Gizmodo had a chance to play with an early-release version, and the reviews and results seem quite positive.

That’s it for this (last week). We’ll have another news roundup on Friday to get back on the regular schedule. Until then, be excellent to each other.

Let’s be honest. Learning new stuff as an adult is hard. Without the regiment of formal schooling (and without curriculum provided by experienced professionals), getting a grasp on a new topic can be very challenging. This might be more true of the technology field than any other. If you want to bone up on your history or math skills, many times you can pick up a few books and gain knowledge. But unless you’re researching the history of BASIC, books aren’t always the most helpful thing for learning new technologies. Sure, I can buy a few books that promise to teach me Python (I have) and do all the exercises (I have), but the subject matter is so wide, it’s hard to feel like you have a real good grasp on the subject (I don’t) even after you’ve finished the books. That’s why places that offer Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) like edX are so great. You get curriculum and direct instruction and are able to interact with other students and instructors when you get stuck.

Learning the underlying technology of baseball analytics is no easy task either. There’s scripting and database work involved. You need a firm grasp on SQL and R and other languages to be able to do what you want. It’s easy to get stuck, and that’s assuming you knew where to start in the first place. Well, edX has a solution for that as well. Boston University is once again offering their Sabermetrics 101 course through edX, and it’s the perfect place to start your understanding of everything that goes into being a good baseball analyst. Oh, and you can take it for free.

Our FanGraphs colleague/spirit animal Paul Swydan did a great writeup of the course when it was offered the first time around. The course starts with some history and basics of sabermetrics, and then moves on to teaching some of the technological tools needed to do one’s own research. You will learn the basics of SQL and R, but, more importantly, how to use these languages for the specific needs of baseball research. Though I didn’t have the bandwidth to take the course the first time around, I did poke around a little, and the offerings are both in depth yet totally approachable for seemingly anyone. All it takes is (very basic) computer skills and a willingness to learn.

Dr. Andy Andres, a senior lecturer at BU and the instructor for the course, told me that even more is in store for version two.

“We have re-vamped the second half of the course, making sure we do justice to WAR as much as we can in an introductory course — we cover not just hitting now, but cover the basics of fielding and pitching. And we have completely re-worked our R curriculum, hopefully having more success is learners getting through some intro programming skills.”

A while back, I presented some how-tos on getting a Retrosheet SQL database onto your machine. Many of you asked for help in querying the thing, which is a reasonable request. However, every time I tried to write one, I got stuck. Sure I could have supplied some sample queries, but to really be able to use the database, one needs understanding of how SQL structure works. If you got through building the database, but still aren’t quite sure how to use it, this is the course for you.

If you didn’t build a database, you can still use the course, however. One of the best parts about Sabermetrics 101 is that all work is done in hosted sandboxes. You don’t need SQL or R installed on your computer to partake in the learning. edX hosts the necessary machines for you. All you need is an internet browser. Sure, you can work on the exercises on your local machine if you wish, but the sandboxing option ensures that any user has access to the proper tools and takes away any apprehension one might have of wrecking their system while they’re trying out new things.

Class starts on July 7, and is certainly worth a look for anyone looking to improve their baseball analysis skills. You can take the course for free, or pay $25 if you want to receive the verified certificate. You won’t learn everything (Andres says that a 201 course is in the works), but you will walk away confident enough to use Google and other tools to find answers that actually make sense.

I encourage any and every TechGraphs reader to take part. I’m fully committing to this session and look forward to seeing all of you in the forums.

There are basically two types of sports tracking technology, when you boil it all down. There’s the Big Data sector, which consists of things like StatCast, SportVu, and the like. These technologies grab gigabytes and gigabytes of data which can be then queried, filtered, paired with video, and massaged into useful points that can be digested by both players and team-employed statisticians.

But the other sector, while perhaps getting a little less press, is growing at a great pace. This is, of course, the private, small-data, consumer space. These are the things we strap to both our sports equipment and ourselves. Fitness bands have been around for some time (in the context of this technology, at least), but lately there has been a big push into the realm of stuff we clip on to our stuff — our skateboards, our tennis rackets, and our golf clubs.

Companies that make golf tracking devices have an upper hand in that people fricking love spending money on golf. It’s an expensive game by itself, but it also has the inherent advantage of being incredibly difficult to play. Ergo, people spend hundreds of dollars on swing trainers, books, videos, new clubs, and any other gizmo or gadget that they think will help their game. I am no different. Is this money better spent on good old fashioned lessons? Most certainly, but that’s for another article. The truth is, most people don’t improve their handicaps. They reach a certain level and stay the same, or even get worse. This makes these golf tracking technologies somewhat perplexing. It doesn’t have to do with the fact that they purport to help you better your game. It has to do with the methods involved.

Some of these devices help more in the general sense. The Microsoft Band’s new updates for golf a fairly straight forward. It helps you keep track of your shots (replacing that archaic pencil and paper method, I guess) and tells you how far you walked on the course and how many calories you burned golfing. It also gives you notes on how much time you spent in the fairway and how you did on the greens. The best part is, after loading the course on your Band, the technology is hands off. No need to grab the smartphone or tag clubs. It’s a passive golf aid. While I don’t have experience with it yet, I plan to sometime this season.

Many other golf aids/trackers offer more features, but many features aren’t always a good thing for everyone. Take trackers like Game Golf or Arccos. Both feature the same type of technology. Sensors are attached to the end of your clubs, and are paired either with a device worn on the belt (Game) or your smartphone (Arccos). Course GPS data is loaded into the respective devices and the club sensors track where on the course you are when you hit your shots and what clubs you swung. Some simple math is done and when the data is all uploaded, the software tells you how far you hit your clubs, how many greens you reached in regulation, and what your sand save percentage was, among other things.

The company PIQ offers the same thing, but in a sensor that clips to your golf glove. PIQ takes it one step further, allowing wearers to see more advanced metrics like swing speed, tempo, and clubhead path. One of their bigger advantages is showing golfers distances to the front, middle, and backs of greens. Game and Arccos don’t offer this feature (though Microsoft Band does).

All of these things are well and good, assuming the average golfer knows what to do with them. Frankly, they don’t. Say you’re a high or even mid-handicapper. You are on a longer par 4 and need a six-iron to reach the green. You fan it into the woods and the ball ends up going 120 yards total. If you tracked the shot, that goes against your average six-iron distance when you upload your round. Shank your long irons? That’s getting added to the distance average, too. Now, what was supposed to be a point of knowledge has become a point of confusion. If you muff a chip, that shot counts. But all the data is telling you is that you muffed the chip, it doesn’t tell you why.

(Note: I’ve used Game Golf in the past, and the putt tracking technology is actually helpful. When I see my putts-per-round spike, I know it’s time to hit the practice green again, because putting is one of the things I can work on and actually get better at.)

Knowing your swing speed and clubhead path can be beneficial, as long as you know what your ideal swing speed and clubhead path should be. Should you be swinging 85 or 90 miles per hour? Should you be concentrating on more of an inside takeaway or an outside takeaway? Only those with specific instructions or an intimate knowledge of their swing will be able to answer this.

Anyone looking to gain an advantage from these kinds of technologies would either be a good golfer in their own right, or taking instruction from one. That doesn’t mean that this kind of tech is useless — far from it. But in the hands of the uninitiated, it’s no better than a butt-load of SportsVu data being dumped on a GM’s desk without anyone there to help him parse through it.

All these companies have some really cool tech — tech that could help a good or coached golfer improve. They are capturing metrics that are important to understand if one wants to lower scores. But on their own, they’re a key without a lock. Golfers need to know the puzzle before they try solving it. Once they understand the important keystones of their improvement, these kinds of technologies can help be the coach away from the lessons.

(Image via PIQ)

(Editor’s note: After this article was published, Jeff Luhnow told Sports Illustrated that he does not believe this issue happened due to the re-use of passwords. As no official report has been presented, we will leave this article up until further evidence is provided.)

Baseball met espionage without the help of Moe Berg on Monday, as news broke that the FBI was investigating the St. Louis Cardinals under allegations that they unlawfully accessed the internal database of the Houston Astros, known as Ground Control. Nathanial Grow did an excellent job going over the legal implications over at the mothersite, so make sure to check that out to get a sense of how badly this could end up breaking for St. Louis. But since we’re cover the tech stuff, I want to talk about how something like this could have happened.

In the New York Times article, specific mention is made that the “intrusion did not appear to be sophisticated” and that law enforcement believes that it was perpetrated by Cardinals front-office employees. This seemed to soften the initial blow a bit, making it clear that St. Louis wasn’t employing black hat hackers to crack Houston’s system. Instead, those responsible seemed to have gained access to passwords used by Jeff Luhnow and those he took with him when he left for St. Louis for the Houston GM job. And while this isn’t a malicious as someone trying to forcefully access Ground Control, it still casts the Cardinals in bad light. Low-level or not, the Houston data breach represents some serious security holes found in the IT practices of the Cardinals.

Let’s get one thing out of the way. Using someone’s old password isn’t really “hacking.” For one:

And secondly (language warning):

No, nothing really got hacked. It just got accessed. If Cardinals officials had passwords, all they needed was the user name of Luhnow or the person in his stable (it’s not clear whose actual account was used). But that doesn’t mean this should have occurred. Actions of some kind were still taken. So, how was it done? Well, there are a few possibilities.

Some Dummy Wrote Their Password Down

The Silicon Valley clip above is jokey, but it’s based on a lot of truth. I’ve worked in IT for over a decade. I’ve seem passwords written on Post-Its — sometimes hidden under keyboards, sometimes attached right to computer monitors. Most companies install policies that users need to change their password every three months or so. This … confuses people. They have trouble remembering. They write passwords down. Those tend to get left around. It’s dumb and a little sad, but it’s very possible that this whole scandal comes down to something like this.

Some Dummmy Shared Their Password

This is also all too common. Passwords get sent to assistants all the time. I’ve talked to executives who didn’t know their passwords at all. Their assistants updated their phones and laptops when the time came to change passwords. People in the same departments share login credentials all the time. “Crap, I can’t login. Jerry, give me your password. I need this spreadsheet.” They’re not looking to cause data breaches, they are just unaware of their actions. If some IT people wanted to get access to Ground Control, it would be very easy to search email logs and dig up some passwords.

The Cardinals Stored User Passwords as Plain Text

During Luhnow’s tenure in the front office, the Cardinals apparently used a system similar to Ground Control called Redbird. This most likely utilized some kind of content management system, which is built on top of a database. These databases have user tables that include things like names, contact info, usernames, and passwords. Ideally, the passwords would be hashed. Simply put, hashing passwords means changing plain passwords like “mypassword” into a bunch of numbers and letters — “mypassword” becomes “ajd923if902rnasdf09992on”. This gibberish is actually what’s stored on the database, and the server never sees the actual password. It keeps the hash translations elsewhere and just uses the hash to authenticate when a user logs in.

But that’s in a perfect world. It doesn’t always happen. This happened to the Sony Playstation Network a while back. It happens lots of places. It’s very feasible that Cardinals officials — whoever they were — simply pulled up a user that left and was able to see their password clear as day.

Whatever happened, I would bet it lies somewhere within these three options. Anything above that — attacks on properly-encrypted passwords through dictionary or rainbow table attacks– not only would infer serious maliciousness, it would mean the passwords were obtained by someone with a great deal of computer savvy.

Remember, the FBI was able to associate the Cardinals with this because the unauthorized access was traced to a home where known Cardinals people lived or hung out or whatever. Anyone with the smarts to properly reverse engineer and encrypted password probably would know that pretty much any time anyone accesses a server (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter), their public IP address is logged. A password hacker would know to go to a library or use Tor or some other IP-masking tool. But this does not absolve the Cardinals in the least, and it probably makes it worse.

If a former Cardinal employee cracked the Redbird database to obtain passwords to use on Ground Control, the Cardinals could easily say that they are sorry and have taken measures to upgrade the security in their corporate offices. But if this all happened due to some low-level password-finding mission, it means that whoever is in charge of IT over there is lazy at best, or just plain unqualified. Or perhaps Redbird fell out of the realm of regular IT functions. Either way, it’s not good.

If a couple of interns could get access to user passwords this easily, imagine what could happen if someone who knew what they were doing gave it a go. Emails, text messages, photo backups, contracts, salary information, social security numbers — all of it could be at risk. You think we got some tasty stuff when the Ground Control documents were leaked? Imagine the field day Deadspin would have if someone managed to get a hold of John Mozeliak’s emails. People would be poised for ridicule, embarrassment, even identity theft, all because a company that operates in a field ripe for corporate espionage wouldn’t take steps to properly protect people’s passwords.

It’s a sign of the times. Database teams within baseball clubs are a fairly new thing. There are still bugs to be worked out — no pun intended. However, if this whole boondoggle doesn’t open the eyes of the other 28 MLB teams (and probably some NFL, NBA, and NHL teams as well), then I don’t know what will. I imagine some memos have been sent out this morning outlining new security policies. Or at least they should. Because while cracking passwords has become harder, simply copying them down never will.

(Header image via Pablo BD)

If we had an InstaTechGraphs section, this news would go there. However, it is worth noting that MLB.tv is having quite a sale to commemorate Father’s Day. This week, one can purchase MLB.tv for $39.99 or MLB.tv Premium for $49.99. That one-time purchase will give you access for the rest of the season. Yes, the platform has its issues and blackout rules still apply, but this is a pretty tremendous deal for baseball fans. The sale ends this week, so get your finances in order.

E3 – the gaming industry’s biggest yearly conference, kicked off today, and as usual, a lot of big announcements were made. While sports games weren’t at the forefront of the biggest proclamations today, they are most certainly being worked on and updated. EA was kind enough to spill the beans on how the [INSERT SPORTS LEAGUE] 16 games would look and feel.

EA’s biggest franchise, Madden, gets updates every year — some more impressive than others. For Madden 16, elements of fantasy football have been brought into the fold. Gamers will have an option to tweak their chosen team using rounds of fantasy-based drafts. These super teams can then be used to compete against each other or an AI opponent.

As senior EA producer Sean Graddy told Polygon:

“We limit the number of picks that you have so that those decisions are hard […] You’re not going to fill every position on your team. How do we create this draft experience, but take it one step further? With fantasy football you pick a team and you passively watch it. In our game you pick a team and you can play with it on the field. It makes it a bit more special.”

Changes to passing and receiving are also coming, with quarterbacks getting options regarding speed and height of passes, and receivers will be given options to attempt fancy, stylish catches or more traditional ones. These should be nice updates to a game that everyone is going to buy anyway. It comes out August 25th.

Making the logical segue from football to golf, the return of an EA golf video game is imminent. Due to a mixture of personal issues and general ineffectiveness on the course, Tiger Woods has become a persona non grata at EA. Rory McIlroy is the new face of the series, and with him come some other major changes. EA didn’t release a golf game last year, as they worked on revamping the series.

Rory McIlroy PGA Tour is EA’s first sports game that will utilize its Frostbite engine — the same engine that powers games like Battlefield and Dragon Inquisition. The inclusion of the engine allows the game to load an entire course at startup, rather than just one hole at a time. This should drastically cut down on total game time, a welcome addition. I mean, do they really expect us to take a whole hour to play a round of golf?!

Tour will include three different modes of play — Arcade, Classic, and Tour — which each offer their own set of advantages. A new course map feature seems pretty slick, as it gives the player multiple distances to different spots of the course, much like those little booklets you see caddies carrying around. The game drops July 14th.

NHL 16  is not only bringing back many of the online features it cut from this year’s version, but is also making a small change that could make a huge difference. In the past, any time a player wanted to accept a pass, the skater glided until he had possession of the puck. This isn’t how hockey works however. Players take passes while skating the other way, in a complete stop, or in a full sprint. NHL 16 is reportedly adding the ability to accept passes this way. This should enhance the gameplay, which is already very smooth.

Updates to the Be a Pro and Be a GM features are also coming, with wannabe GMs having to deal with things like player morale and clubhouse chemistry. If you play the Be a Pro mode, expect to get more and better feedback from coaches as you sweat and bleed your way to Lord Stanley’s Cup. Look for this game in September.

Soccer is also a sport and FIFA 16 is also a video game. One of the more important updates — the addition of women’s soccer — was already announced. But EA is also mentioning smarter AI defense, more realistic slide tackling, and some more dribbling fanciness.

Passing is also getting an overhaul. Per Polygon:

Perhaps of even more significance is that players are given more control over the pace of their passes. Previously, long passes (hold down the button) were a matter of telling the game to move the ball a long way. Now, they simply say, “kick it hard.” This means that players can ping short, hard passes to one another, a useful antidote to the defense’s greater alertness. Or they can drift long passes across the park with a greater degree of control.

For a long time, sports games have relied on graphics to try and make them seem more realistic. Now, with more advanced hardware and software at their disposal, developers are working to make the games look and play more like the real thing. This is a welcome change and will ensure the line between real and digital will become more imperceptible each year. Where some sports series seem to be a little stagnate (cough, MLB the Show, cough), EA is making strides keep their offerings fresh. Whether it pans out or not remains to be seen. We’ll have to hang our hope on promises for now.

(Header image via Pop Culture Geek)