How do you feel about information technology and its impact in collegiate and professional sports? I am sure if you ask five people you will receive five different answers. Since this is my blog, I will give you my perspective on the topic. The impact of technology on sports is ubiquitous. Personally I feel as though sports information technology has cultivated parity in college football and basketball. I also believe it makes for a more efficient game.
The world of collegiate athletics is all about recruiting. How does a team locate the best athletes and then actively pursue them. How does a team find the coveted "diamond in the rough!" In previous decades a college team needed to have a recruiting coordinator who could "cast a wide net" and had contacts across the country. After locating the potential recruit you had to make contact with the student and wait for several days to receive game film from him or her in order to evaluate their athletic ability. Currently there are collegiate recruiting services that allow college coaches to access databases of high school student athletes and peruse their transcripts, SAT scores, highlight films, photos and videos of prospective players. More importantly colleges can now locate players, whom in previous years would be out of their recruiting area or the player simply might not have been on the radar of a particular school. This is part of the reason you have mid-major athletic programs having more success, such as Butler playing for the NCAA National Championship in Basketball and Boise State competing in BCS Bowl games.
Technology has streamlined the recruiting process and now recruiters do not have to waste man hours pursuing an athlete that does not meet the standards of the perspective team, allowing the recruiter to move forward to the next player. Another form of technology that is used frequently in sports by college recruiters and professional recruiters is youtube. I currently work in the player personnel department in the Arena Football League. We use youtube constantly throughout the day. There are often times we receive a lead on a perspective player and do not have game film of him in our office. When this happens it is not a problem we simply search youtube! More often than not, the players have uploaded game film or a highlight tape and we can then begin our evaluation process.
One of my favorite enhancements to sports via technology is the virtual first down line. The virtual first down line is a yellow or orange line that goes from one sideline to the other on your television screen. This feature was designed to help the fan at home watching the game have an exact idea of how many yards it will take for the team to get a first down. I can remember watching football games before this technology and wondering just how far the first down marker was from the current line of scrimmage and it was annoying, but technology has rectified this issue. Now there is technology on the market for the fan at the game who has a difficulty following all of the action. There is a company that has created a virtual first down line, that can be viewed by everyone in the stadium. The technology has the capability to replace the infamous "chain gang." The "chain gang" are the referees who hold the down markers and the chains which help the referee know where to spot the football. I do not think this technology will ever fully replace the chain gang because it can potentially malfunction, similar to the issues that you might have experienced with the virtual first down line while watching the game at home on television.
As you evaluate the professional sports enviroment, instant replay is the most widely used technology in sports. Instant replay is most frequently used in football, America's newest pastime! Basketball uses instant replay sparingly and baseball has experimented with instant replay but has not fully adopted the technology. Instantly replay is used in football because football has many "bang-bang plays." These are plays which happen fast and need to be further reviewed to ensure the proper judgement was made. Sports is big industry and big business. There are substantial revenues that are generated through sports, and wins and losses can dictate the viability of your franchise. Instant replay is the platform that mitigates human error in sports.
Without technology in sport, it is suffice to say that sport would not be a multibillion dollar industry like it is today!
No comments:
Post a Comment