Forbes.com 4th & static ------------ High up in the stands of every football stadium is a press box. Usually this is a banked set of long desks, where ink-stained wretches watch games and write wire service and newspaper reports for filing as soon as the final whistle blows. However for the past year and a half, at every National Football League game, among the crowd of reporters and hangers-on, sits a single lone official from the officiating crew. Hired by the NFL itself, from the ranks of longtime referees, field judges, and umpires, this solitary man sits in front of a radio receiver with his finger on a plunger. It is not a very visible occupation, hardly indicative of the seminal role it is playing in the nexus of sports and technology. The guy's job? To hold down the plunger key from the moment one play is over, until 15 seconds are left on the play clock. With his Morse key held down, the NFL official lets a single coach on the offensive team have a clear wireless radio channel to talk to his quarterback. This is the chance for the offensive coach to whisper to the quarterback, tell him to watch for the big lummox who keeps coming at him from the blind side, give him a play and formation, maybe, just maybe, even tell him how well he's doing or chew him out. All of this without interference from the crescendo of stadium noise. Now, mind you, there's no talking back. This is an entirely one-way channel, encrypted at the coach's belt pack, transmitted to the receiver in the press booth, passed by the plunger key and the NFL official, then transmitted back over the air, down onto the field, where it is picked up by a radio receiver mounted inside the quarterback's helmet. There will be voices in his head. Bear Bryant goes digital Once upon a time, football was played mano a mano; it was a game of mud and sweat and derring-do played out in Ohio steel towns and rickety college stadiums. Guys like Knute Rockne and Bear Bryant and Woody Hayes captured our collective imaginations as they paced the sidelines. Out on the field heroic performers accomplished miracles. It was taken for granted that a smart quarterback, driving his team downfield in the last few minutes of the game was calling the plays himself, using every ounce of knowledge and experience to shred the opposition and win the game for the home side. Today's reality, of course, is far more complicated. In professional and high-level college sports, winning means using better technology better than the team you're playing. The intercom system is an outgrowth of the field phones that have put spotters in touch with coaches for years. The company behind most of the professional sports intercoms is the Telex Corp. of Minneapolis, Minn. The privately held firm has several thousand employees and posted revenues of about $180 million last year. Watch any televised game and the coaches almost invariably wear headsets equipped with a "boom" microphone--the fine print on the boom reads Telex since the firm has a deal with the NFL to supply these systems to all the teams. The much bigger printed name is Sprint, on the earpiece--but the telecommunications carrier has nothing to do with the headset systems. Telex sold the advertising space to Sprint. Pro football headset is a small, but highly visible piece of this company's intercom and audio business. (Telex claims over 80% of the PC manufacturer bundled microphone business today--not a bad position if voice recognition takes off in the coming year.) Private party line NFL rules specify that whatever equipment the home team has, must be supplied to the visitors. "If one side's intercom fails, the rules say we have to shut down the other team's too," says Tom Hansen, Telex's national sales manager for broadcast products. "As you can imagine, reliability was a key part of our sales pitch. We can offer up to 5 channels of party-line style intercom. Offensive and defensive coordinators always have separate systems, but some teams like the San Francisco 49ers use all five: offense and defense, special teams, quarterback coaches, line coaches." Each intercom channel is a party line. To date, all these systems are wire based--cable pullers follow coaches around on the field. These systems coexist, in a parallel universe, with the one-way helmet com systems. Telex provided a special audio output jack on some of its units for the quarterback system, which was built by Control Dynamics of Ivyland, Pa."We take the audio from the standard intercom headset and route it through a separate circuit," explains Harvey Shuhart, the founder of the small wireless engineering firm. The company provides a "talk" button on the unit for the coach, uses tunable, low-power Motorola radios, and offers a proprietary hardware-based encryption scheme. The encrypted data stream heads up to the press booth from the coach's belt pack, is controlled by the NFL official, then is transmitted back out to the field where it is picked up by a battery-powered receiver hidden inside the padding of the quarterback's helmet. The systems are rugged enough that Shuhart claims they've "never had one knocked out, even when the player was." Has it changed the game? A little bit. But with 15 seconds to go, the quarterback is still on his own. Video coaching It is scary to think how good some of the old coaches might have been if they had the kind of tools today's crew gets to use. Vince Lombardi would have been even more unbeatable with an interactive video system that could pull up every blitz in the last three games by next week's opponent. In his day, the best the Packers could have was a scratchy 16mm film that was endlessly advanced and reversed. No more. Today, Mike Holmgren of the Green Bay Packers has one of the most advanced video coaching systems anywhere. A central edit station and massive hard drive storage array is linked to several coaches' stations by fiber-optic networking. All of the team's games, and the last three or four of next week's opponents' games, are stored on massive 9 gigabyte hard drives enough for six to nine hours of video. Each play is coded with key data on formation, down, yardage needed etc. in a tailored relational database system--a database where each separate piece of stored information can be matched with any other piece or pieces. Then, at his desk, Holmgren can query his Power Mac both for opponent plays, and for his own team's efforts--producing a series of "cut-ups" (football lingo for collections of plays) instantaneously and interactively. With a remote control in his hand, the coach can slow down, stop, fast forward and rewind, take a look at every play that had a particular player involved, or change his mind and look at anything else that attracts his attention--all from his Power Mac and monitors. If he wants to save a particular query, he can record the series to tape deck. Since the original video is all stored digitally, there is no generation-to-generation quality loss as in traditional videotape recording. Instant replay Avid Sports, a privately held spinoff from the Avid Corporation in Waltham, Mass., has created the premier sports videotape coaching system that combines data entered for every play in game analysis software (essentially relational databases configured for football data) and links it to videotape start and stop points. The centerpiece in the system is an $80,000 video editing station that runs from a Power Macintosh. This is the Sports Pro, and is both an encoding system (to bring the game video into digital format) and an editing station to manipulate and create cassettes of particular plays. About half of the NFL already uses these stations. "This is preparation for a war that runs from the end of the game Sunday for seven days until kickoff the following week. Anything to speed things up is a competitive advantage," says Bob Simmons, vice president of sales and marketing at Avid Sports. The coaches' stations cost about $25,000 each. But the full-blown system at Green Bay had a $300,000 price tag. (Two other NFL teams have the full-blown network systems: Kansas City Chiefs and New England Patriots.) The NFL won't allow video to be used either on the sidelines or in the locker room at halftime. Thus most teams use video stills that are transmitted at the end of each play down to the sideline. But baseball has different rules. "The Kansas City Royals [a baseball team] have a system in the tunnel behind the dugout. After a player strikes out, he can come in and look at the pitches he missed immediately," says Simmons. That same instant analysis is available for hockey and basketball teams. Can football be far off? "We're not Neanderthals," says George Young, general manager of the New York Giants and a member of the key NFL committee that approves things like the helmet intercoms and the like. "We want to take advantage of technology, but we don't want to totally robotize the game. We don't want it to be a game of who has the best computer." If that were the case, Bill Gates would be a first-round draft pick.