Imagine a future in which Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and every other NFL player takes the field armed with a piece of digital technology that can communicate information instantaneously.
Instead of long, abstruse playcalls radioed into a quarterback’s ear and getting drowned out by tens of thousands screaming fans, each play would just appear in front of each player’s eyes on a wristband. It would completely transform the way the game looks—and even how it’s played.
And as it happens, it’s now closer to a reality than ever before.
In a move that fell under the radar of most football fans, the league that oversees high-school football in Texas just approved a change permitting the use of these types of wearable devices. And while Friday night football in the Lone Star state might seem a long way from NFL stadiums, recent history shows that high-school fields now serve as the breeding grounds for the next stages of the game’s evolution—even when those ideas seem completely radical.
The spread offense and the pass-happy “Air Raid” scheme were both popularized at Texas high schools before trickling up to the pro game. The latest innovation might be less of a schematic advancement than a technological one.
And the ramifications could be seismic, from supercharging offenses by allowing them to rip off plays at warp speed to tamping down the sign-stealing suspicions that have roiled the sport in recent years.
“Obviously as a society we get these technology advances everywhere. Football, I guess, is no different,” says Larry Hill, the coach of state champion Smithson Valley High School in Texas. “Once you go down the technology trail, you very rarely see it go back.”
Football tech has come a long way since the invention of the plastic helmet. In his 45 years of coaching Hill has seen plenty of it, from watching film on newfangled VHS tapes to storing a vast library of playbooks, as he says, “in the air.”
In fact, the NFL has spent years looking into wearable devices. One of the companies that designs wristband technology has already won an award and funding from the league for its innovation.
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