TechGraphs News Roundup: 9/18/2015

Happy Friday, dear readers. Between the baseball playoff push and the beginning of the pro and college football seasons, we are in for another wild sports weekend. Between your gulps of beer and piles of nachos, feel free to cleanse your palette with all the sports-tech stories we found interesting this week.

I’ve been using technology to improve my golf practice (look for that article soon), so when Wilson announced their new smart basketball that helps players get stats on their practice sessions, I was intrigued. The implementation seems fairly simple and straightforward. It seems most applicable to serious student and pro athletes, but I suppose anyone who wants to improve on their skills before their next pickup game could benefit.

For the first time ever, the FIFA video game franchise will feature women players this year. This is good! However, never content to let anything go unsullied, the NCAA is, once again, ruining things. Due to eligibility concerns, 16 women players have been pulled from the digital rosters of FIFA 16. Though the athletes and EA Games seemed to do everything by the book, the players didn’t want to risk their collegiate futures by disobeying the all-mighty NCAA. They weren’t getting paid to appear on the game, but the NCAA still found a reason to not let these talented women represent their countries. The NCAA has their stellar reputation to uphold, after all.

Golden Tee is making the jump from the pub floor to your phone. Now, enjoy all the fun of virtual golf without the ever-present smell of cigarettes and stale beer. Not having to put your hand on that cesspool of a rollerball is also a plus. Though, it’s not as if your smartphone isn’t without its own germ farms.

In case you weren’t annoyed enough with the respective brands by themselves, Snapchat has teamed up with the NFL. Simply subscribe to the NFL’s Live Story feed and get inundated with countless pictures and video every Sunday. Just don’t expect to see broadcast footage beamed over with cat faces on it — TV video won’t be sent via the service.

ESPN has a nice story about the Miami Dolphins and how they are using all kinds of technology to help keep their athletes healthy. There’s even mention of their work with Kitman Labs, which our own Dr. Bryan Cole profiled not too long ago.

Bad news, wannabe daily fantasy millionaires: The system is already rigged against you.

Last year, NBA 2K15’s facial scanning features lead to some terrifying results. This year, NBA Live 16 is taking a crack at it, and, according to Polygon, the results are much less nightmare-inducing.

You think getting a pre-draft spreadsheet together for your fantasy football league is hard? Try being the guy in charge of assigning skills to every player in Madden.

Finally, if your day has been wrecked by Google Now leaking sports scores when you were DVRing a game, Gizmodo has a nice write-up on how to save yourself from future frustration

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