What’s this New England Patriot alum doing at a virtualization tech event?
Some user group meetings are about cloud technology. Some cover meaty topics like cybersecurity and the hyperconverged infrastructure. Then there is the Virtualization Technology User Group’s January gathering where speakers talk about all of the above and one other subject — the New England Patriots.
Held in the Patriot’s home — Gillette Stadium — VTUG offered attendees an opportunity to hear about the latest virtualization trends and rub broad shoulders with former Patriots players. One former National Football League lineman remembered what it was like to play for a team that has won multiple championships over the better part of the past two decades.
“It’s been unbelievable to see what those guys have accomplished,” said Logan Mankins (pictured), former offensive lineman who played nine seasons for the Patriots. “It all starts at the top. You have a good owner, the best coach ever, and the best quarterback ever.”
Mankins paid a visit to the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VTUG Winter Warmer event in Foxborough, Massachusetts, and spoke with host Stu Miniman (@stu). They discussed Mankins’ career, his experience with the Patriots and player concerns surrounding concussions.
Mankins earned numerous honors during his 11-year pro football career, including being named to the Pro Bowl seven times. He joined the Patriots after being selected in the 2005 draft, following back-to-back Super Bowl wins by his new employer. Ironically, he was traded in 2014 before the Patriots would claim the title again.
Using tech for head health
As an offensive guard, Mankins had what may well have been the most important job in all of sports: protecting future Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady. “You know he’s always prepared; you never have to worry about him,” Mankins said. “Just the way he competes and works, it rubs off on other guys. He’s the ultimate teammate and the ultimate competitor.”
The NFL has been plagued in recent years with issues surrounding the risk of permanent brain damage to the men who play a violent sport at its highest level. Data released by the league just last month showed that NFL players experienced more concussions in 2017 than in each of the previous five years.
“The more you learn about it, the more you worry about it,” Mankins admitted. “You hope you’re one of the guys it’s not going to affect, but there are guys it’s really affecting in bad ways.”
To deal with rising concern over concussions in football, the NFL has taken a number of steps that includes the adoption of new technology. The league just announced funding for three concussion and injury tech startups, including Curv.ai, which employs augmented reality on a mobile platform to assess player injury risk.
Another example is the use of the Concussionometer, supplied by HeadSafeIP Pty Ltd, to provide more accurate diagnosis after impact. The player wears what looks like sleek science fiction glasses, which can detect abnormal brain activity by flashing lights into a player’s eyes. Information is then relayed to a smartphone app for evaluation.
Former NFL players are also promoting the adoption of robotic tackling dummies at the youth sports level as a way to lessen the likelihood of concussion problems. The Mobile Virtual Player is a remote controlled, padded device designed to eliminate the need for teammates to tackle each other during drills.
“The techniques that they’re teaching now, with the blocking and the tackling, and not use your head as much, it’s a lot safer now,” Mankins said.
The use of technology also extends beyond player safety as many NFL teams have adopted new methods for strengthening fan engagement and improving the game experience. Digital transformation has affected many industries, and the NFL has turned into a data-gathering machine.
NFL partners with Amazon to manage data
In partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc., the NFL has created Next Gen Stats to channel data collection through cloud computing and machine learning. It may not be widely known, but since 2015 every NFL player has taken the field with radio frequency identification or RFID tags from Zebra Technologies inside shoulder pads. This has allowed the NFL to gather data on field location, speed and movement for every player. Sensors are even included now in first-down markers, end-zone pylons, and the referees themselves.
That’s a lot of data, so the NFL turned to Amazon and its SageMaker machine learning tool to make sense of it all. The result was a major cache of information that can be used by teams to evaluate player performance, by broadcasters to improve TV production, and by fans to gain new insights into the game itself.
Mankins retired in 2016, so there wasn’t a lot of data to be collected about his on-field performance. But he comfortably accepted a lineman’s lower-profile role in the star-driven world of pro football. “We always knew that without us, the offense couldn’t go; the team couldn’t go,” Mankins said. “Most linemen, they don’t want to be ‘the face’ out there anyway.”
Patriots embrace tech solutions
Mankins’ former team has not been low-key when it comes to technology adoption. The Patriots were the first NFL team to have a team website (1995), the first to offer high-definition streaming video of games, and one of the first to provide mobile apps to fans. In late January, days before the team’s Super Bowl appearance in Minnesota, the Patriots launched the Not Done Network, the first team-specific, 24-hour online streaming channel for the Super Bowl, which broadcast content for six straight days leading up to the big game.
The Patriots have been following a trend in the sports world of using technology to reimagine the fan experience. Fans will get another taste of what the future holds when the next new major sports arena to be built — the Golden State Warriors basketball team’s Chase Center — will open in San Francisco, California, in 2019.
Accenture PLC has been involved in providing technology for the new venue, and one of its top executives, John Walsh, has hinted that innovations will push the fan experience to a whole different level. Watch the complete video segment with Accenture’s John Walsh below:
The Patriots lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in this month’s Super Bowl LII. But the team won its tenth AFC championship in January and has dominated the league in the years before Mankins joined the NFL and after he left. “They’ve had an unbelievable run,” Mankins said.
At the NFL opener this past season, Bud Light distributed 65,000 glasses to fans attending the Patriots home game. But these were no ordinary glasses. Each one came equipped with a chip, and when paired with an Android or iOS smartphone app, the glass would light up every time the Patriots scored a touchdown during every game throughout the season.
Technology intersects with sports again. There were a lot of blinking glasses all over New England during the past five months, especially on Sundays.
Watch the complete video interview with Logan Mankins below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VTUG Winter Warmer.
Photo: SiliconANGLE
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