Major League Soccer has announced they will begin implementing the concussion tracking device xPatch next season in order to further study the effects of head trauma on their players.

The xPatch was recently used in a rugby match by the London-based Saracens (no relation to Friday Night Lights character Matt Saracen, unfortunately). Some in London have dismissed the patches, calling them gimmicky, but Edward Griffith, the Saracens CEO, responded tersely saying, “It is the furthest thing from a gimmick. This is not something we just thought would be good to try out last weekend. This has been nine months in the planning. We have set aside a budget of £350,000 for it for next season funded by the Drake Foundation because we believe wholly in the significance of the research. I don’t want to be visiting these players in 20 or 25 years time in a hospital where they are suffering from dementia or some other neurological condition.”

The xPatch, made by Seattle-based X2 Biosystems, contains a gyroscope and accelerometer that are encased in plastic. They are 1” by 3” and placed on a bone behind the players ear and taped down for games. The xPatch records all of the head trauma a player experiences and sends the information to trainers via an app.

A device like the xPatch may have been able to better track the head trauma former MLS star Taylor Twellman experienced during his career (he retired after suffering his sixth concussion). Twellman has since committed to donating his brain after his death for concussion reasearch and has his own foundation, Think Taylor, to raise money and awareness for concussion prevention.

Further implementation of the device could also help prevent scenarios like the one that occurred during the NFL playoffs on January 3rd, when the Ravens Courtney Upshaw had a rare clean sack of Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who’s helmet bounced off the turf when he went down.

Roethlisberger returned to the game five minutes later after having his neck and shoulders tested and going through the NFL concussion protocol. He looked shaky when he returned to the huddle and proceeded to throw an interception on his first snap, causing some to speculate that he returned to the game too soon.

Dr. Matt Matava of the NFL Physician Society explained to the Guardian previously that X2 Biosystems technology, “has allowed us to accurately diagnose concussions immediately following an injury [about six to eight minutes after a hit]. The software also allows us to compare the players’ injury date to their baseline in order to objectively assess changes in mental status.” All 32 NFL teams currently use X2’s concussion management software.

The hope is that the technology becomes unobtrusive enough for players of all contact sports to use during games to detect in-game head trauma and track the sub-concussive impacts a player experiences over the course of his career. Considering the tragic deaths of former NFL stars Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, and the nightmare that the NFL concussion settlement has become, it’s a breakthrough that can’t come soon enough.

(Image via Bay Area Bias)

We mentioned yesterday that the Super Bowl will be available to stream on NBC for freesies. However, if you were to watch via NBCs web stream, you wouldn’t get to see all those commercials everyone would be talking about the next day at work. Social suicide, to be certain! But fear not, cord cutters. Tumblr has you covered.

According to Reuters, NBC will be posting the highly-anticipated (and highly-priced) ads on Tumblr shortly after they air. This will allow people watching via stream, people not watching at all, or fans looking to re-watch their favorites an opportunity to catch all the spots that run during one of advertising’s biggest days.

While many companies post their commercials to sites like YouTube and Vimeo, NBC will curate their own one-stop shop for the ads. For some, the commercials are just as (or perhaps more) important as the game. NBC is smart to offer those taking advantage of their new streaming service to also catch the ads online — not to mention a repository for repeat viewings. It will take a little multi-tab navigation, but at least game streamers will now know what the hell everyone is talking about on Twitter.

(Image via The Inspiration Room)

Make sure your laptop and tablets are locked and loaded come Super Bowl Sunday. You’re going to need them.

NBCUniversal today announced plans to live stream 11 hours of Super Bowl content, no strings attached. Those strings typically include a log-in process with the consumer’s cable or satellite account information. NBC will not be streaming via mobile app, however, as they do not have NFL live streaming rights. But with a tablet or phablet and the right web browser installed, streaming from nbcsports.com/liveextra shouldn’t be an issue.

The 11 hours, which is five hours too long (figure 3 ½ hours for the game, 45 minutes each pre and post-game shows) will be followed by the midseason premier of The Blacklist. That’s quite a gift for cord cutters that happen to love both Marshawn Lynch and James Spader. NBC’s coverage starts at noon ET and figures to end around 10 pm ET.

NBC’s motive for its “Super Stream Sunday” is to promote its TV Everywhere marketing campaign, naturally entitled “Watch TV Without the TV.” TV Everywhere is the practice of content providers using authenticated methods, such as streaming or video on-demand, to allow customers to access content they already pay for via the internet or mobile devices.

“We are leveraging the massive digital reach of the Super Bowl to help raise overall awareness of TV Everywhere by allowing consumers to explore our vast TVE offering with this special one-day-only access, said Alison Moore, general manager and executive vice president of TV Everywhere and NBCUniversal.

Cord cutters beware – after the Super Bowl, TV Everywhere will only work with a valid user name and password associated with one’s provider account. But maybe this is NBC’s one big step in a direction of genuinely free live streaming – a future of connecting to a stream without a provider account.

“Consumer behavior is changing and people are looking to have content when they want it and where they want it,” Rob Hayes, executive vice president of NBC Digital told USA Today last month.

Katy Perry fans are also in luck. According to the press release, this is the first time NBC Sports Extra Live is live streaming the halftime show.

NBC did add that users will “receive consistent messaging in and around the experience about the ease in authenticating after the end of The Blacklist.”

(Image via The Inspiration Room)

Burgeoning digital sports network Whistle Sports announced they closed their Series B round of funding, raising $28 million led by Emil Capital Partners and featuring prominent athletes like Derek Jeter and Peyton Manning as investors.

The network launched in January 2014 and has experienced tremendous growth in only a year, with close to 13 million YouTube subscribers, while gaining 10 million new social followers across their platforms each month. The next closest sports YouTube channel is the NBA at close to six million subscribers.

Their most popular YouTube channel partner is Dude Perfect, the group of Texas A&M alums who got their start making ridiculous basketball trick shots. They have also begun forming content partnerships with professional athletes like Jeremy Lin.

The network’s revenue has been more than doubling each quarter and their videos have been viewed over two billion times. This can be attributed in part to the network’s popularity with the much sought after demographic for advertisers—young males (78 percent of their viewers are male).

Along with pro athlete content partnerships, Whistle Sports has partnered with nearly all major pro sports franchises, including the NFL, MLB, PGA Tour, and NASCAR. In an interview with Forbes, John West, the CEO of Whistle Sports, described the companies relationship with sports leagues, saying, “Each is a true partnership, in which they give us access to their libraries that we use to co-create content, and then we distribute that content on our platforms as well as theirs. Why did they all choose to partner with us? They’re losing young viewers and they have to adapt and evolve—we’re the vehicle to make that happen.”

With nearly 40 percent of their viewers from outside the US, the company has recently opened an office in London and is planning opening another in Latin America this year.

Given their amazing growth and plans to go international, Whistle Sports is now a giant in the digital media space, building in one year what took others like VICE years to do.

(Photo by George Bush Presidential Library and Museum via Flickr)

These days, if a stadium wants to boast about its amenities, it better be sporting a high-capacity WiFi network. Fans are not only there to watch the game, but to keep up on other games, post pictures of themselves on social media, and even watch highlights captured at a much better vantage point. All this can be done over cellular networks, certainly, but for maximum speed and reliability, fans are looking to connect their mobile devices to WiFi. And fans at the NCAA Football National Championship were certainly sucking some bandwidth at AT&T Stadium in Arlington.

According to a report by Mobile Sports Report, the in-stadium WiFi at AT&T Stadium carried 4.93 TB of data over its network during the game on Monday night. AT&T also saw 1.41 TB travel over its cellular network. This totals over six terabytes of data from computers and mobile devices, and that’s not even counting data transmitted on Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint Networks. Even so, that number is higher than any data total posted at a sporting event, including last year’s Super Bowl and the home opener of the San Francisco 49ers’ new stadium.

While this number won’t be repeated on your typical NFL or MLB game day, it’s proof that more and more fans want the reliability (and free-ness) of WiFi when using their devices at sporting events. Though these types of things are rarely publicized, I imagine many teams in slightly older stadiums are working on or planning to work on upgrading their current infrastructure. This spike in data usage isn’t something that is going away any time soon. Teams would be smart to be on the front end of this trend.

(Image via Ron Kikuchi)

Perhaps this is the robot device that will bring future generations to their knees in anguish and empathy for our generation, but alas it exists:

Yes, BeachBot is a little robot turtle that draws stuff in the sand. Using its little cold metal fingers, it tirelessly scrapes designs into a Swiss beach near you. Why does this matter? What does this project merit that it should pull, by my count, eight engineers away from the matters of world hunger and missing sock matches? Well here’s an obvious item to me: beach sports.
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Is the NFL ready for its first defensive Most Valuable Player since Lawrence Taylor in 1986? Pro Football Focus is.

The web site, which provides individual player analytics, recently named Houston Texans defensive end J.J. Watt as its player of the year. Watt’s stiffest competition for the MVP award, Aaron Rodgers of Green Bay, finished second. However, PFF has named its honor the Dwight Stephenson award after the Miami Dolphins offensive lineman. The best players can play any position, PFF says, as opposed to MVPs mainly awarded to quarterbacks or running backs.

PFF watches game tape and grades each player on their ability to execute their roles on each individual play. The PFF staff blends statistics and performance-based scouting (results rather than technique) in their approach. In defining its grading process, PFF states that stats can lie, and there’s context of a statistic that they value.

“If the quarterback throws an accurate first down conversion that is dropped, the quarterback receives the same credit as he would have with a catch,” writes PFF.

Watt finished 2014 with 20.5 sacks, four forced fumbles, one interception, 59 solo tackles, a safety, two touchdowns and three receiving touchdowns.

“Watt is so far out on his own in terms of play that he breaks every graph we create to try and illustrate it, extending axes and generally sitting off on a data point all to himself,” writes Sam Monson, a PFF analyst. “He is completely redefining what we thought a defensive player was capable of, and is only getting better.”

Following a tedious process which involves three different analysts viewing game broadcast and All-22 footage, PFF awards each player a grade between +2.0 and -2.0 in half increments with zero given for an average play. Zero is the most often awarded value with other values given to plays that are an exception – both good and bad. Watt racked up a +107.5 grade. The next highest 3-4 defensive end was Sheldon Richardson of the New York Jets with a +39.9 grade.

Here is an example:

The varying degrees of positive and negative grades add a little bit more context than a simple plus and minus systems. An offensive lineman might surrender a sack on a given play, but how quickly was he beaten? Allowing a defender to slip past and get into the quarterback’s face in 1.9 seconds is obviously much worse than allowing that same sack in 2.7 seconds, so while both plays are negatives, they certainly won’t carry the same exact grade.

Using that same example, if the pressure is surrendered in 1.9 seconds and the quarterback sidesteps the sack, it’s certainly not indicative of the offensive lineman’s pass-blocking acumen, so there’s no reason to change his grade because he “only” surrendered a pressure and not a sack. The goal of the grading is to isolate individual performance as much as possible, fully realizing that there is always a certain level of dependency on teammates in football.

While PFF supports Watt, history does not. The MVP has not hailed from a non-playoff team since 1973. The Texans didn’t make the playoffs, though they did finish 9-7.

The MVP will be awarded January 31.

(Image via Mike)

Football coaches at every level have long relied on game film to judge their teams’ performance. But this year, NFL teams have partnered with Zebra Technologies to more accurately track their players’ position and speed on the field.

The real-time location solution (RLTS) used by the NFL relies on radio frequency identification (RFID) tags worn by the players in their shoulder pads. Each RFID tag broadcasts its location 25 times per second to the approximately 20 receivers located around the stadium. From this single sensor, the MotionWorks server can determine a player’s location on the field and speed. By adding a second sensor, Zebra can also track a player’s direction and orientation. The sensors, placed on the player’s shoulder pads, are less than an inch in diameter, and include a battery designed to last an entire season. This improves the usability and scalability of the solution, since teams won’t need to spend time and energy removing, charging, and reinstalling the sensors.

The result is a system that can track all 22 players on a field with an accuracy of a few inches, according to Zebra’s data sheet. According to general manager for sports applications Eric Petrosinelli, this gives Zebra’s solution a clear advantage over other solutions based on technology like global positioning systems (GPS).

“Other solutions aren’t providing anywhere near the accuracy or operational simplicity of our solution,” Petrosinelli said. “They don’t really have scalable solutions.”

The NFL would seem to agree: Zebra won what Petrosinelli called a “bake-off” in 2013 among a number of vendors selling competing systems. Their reward was a multi-year contract with the NFL. As training camp was getting underway, the NFL announced that Zebra receivers would be placed in 17 NFL stadiums (specifically, Atlanta, Baltimore, Carolina, Chicago, Cincinnati, Denver, Detroit, Green Bay, Houston, Jacksonville, Miami, New England, New Orleans, Oakland, San Francisco, St. Louis and Washington) and added RFID tags to every player’s pads. Receivers will be installed in the remaining stadiums, as well as “one-off” stadiums like London’s Wembley Stadium and Pro Bowl site Aloha Stadium, during the offseason.

The data generated by the system is currently controlled by the league to prevent the handful of teams with the solution in place from gaining an unfair advantage from the data. A few teams — the 49ers, Lions, and Saints — will also have Zebra solutions installed at their practice facilities. But for now, teams and fans will have to be content with the samples like these that have been shown in the Thursday night games.

Although the MotionWorks solution may be new to the sports world, Zebra has developed and used similar RFID-based solutions for years in the manufacturing industry. But Petrosinelli said the technology adapted surprisingly well to the new application.

“One thing we’ve been pleasantly surprised by is the operational ease in deploying and operating the solution,” Petrosinelli said.

Zebra’s future plans include expanding vertically to other levels of football, as well as horizontally to other sports. Petrosinelli said his company was in talks with a number of organizations (though he couldn’t give their names) to apply Zebra’s technology to their fields.

“We’ve spoken to people both domestically and globally,” he said. “When you win a contract like [the NFL’s], a lot of people take notice of that.”

And while Petrosinelli said Zebra was considering partnering with other companies to incorporate data from sensors like accelerometers or heart rate monitors, the company currently has no plans to design such sensors internally.

“We’re not a consumer wearables company,” Petrosinelli said. “The way our system is designed, we could be a transporter of that information, but we’re not going to be in that business.”

The team behind the most stupidly addicting baseball video game in the world — Out of the Park Baseball or OOTP — is apparently looking for a new tagline:

As our stable of sports management games grows, we realized that we need a great tagline to pull them together. (Kind of like The Big Lebowski’s rug, only without the soiling part.)

We thought about it a lot, and we realized that “We Make the Best Sports Management Games on the Planet” didn’t have the right ring. Markus’ suggestion, “Bow Down Before Us,” wasn’t quite right either.

So we’re turning to you, our loyal fans. As explained in last Friday’s newsletter, we need you to send your suggestions to tagline@ootpdevelopments.com by midnight Eastern time on January 11, 2015. The winner will score some cool stuff.

The prize bundle is composed of blah-blah-blah and something-something never-see-your-wife-and-kids-again, but you don’t need to worry about that. Instead, offer me your best suggestions and I’ll go ahead and forward them on your behalf.

So far I’ve got:

3) “OOTP: Video games for thinkers. And addicts.”

2) “OOTP: Honey, stop crying. I’ll come to bed when I’m done.”

1) “OOTP: Because graduating or seeing your kids’ first steps are hella overrated.”

There’s gotta be a winner in there somewhere!

Word is the Google Cardboard toy — which started as a gimmick, is now a toy, and will soon be a tool, I suspect — now has over 500,000 users.

This got me thinking: We already have mini-cameras we can embed in the ground; we have 360° camera technology; and now we have cheap, accessible virtual reality (VR).

Isn’t it time for 360° MLB.tv? Perhaps a camera embedded neatly in front of home plate or the pitcher’s mound. Maybe on the back of the mound to watch closeup up as the shortstop flips a double-play ball to the second baseman.

Or what about mounting a 3D camera on the cable-tugged NFL sky view cameras? Allow fans to watch the play unfold while focusing on just their fantasy wide receiver, finally giving them the vindication to scream at the quarterback, “He’s wide open! Throw it to James Jones already!”

And doesn’t NASCAR already have cameras mounted on every vehicle? Would it be any more difficult to swap in a 360 model?

The technology is probably not a point just yet where a 360 camera can be safely embedded into a soccer pitch or — certainly not — a basketball court or hockey rink. But goal post cross bars, tops of basketball backboards and jumbotrons dangling from stadium roofs could all be reasonable and fun locations for VR watchers.

Think about it, sports execs. Because it would be awesome.