Super Bowl LX Soliloquies

20:36John:And the commissioner talked about that yesterday a bit as being a primary issue when we talk about 18-2. Why is training camp the way it is? Why are there three preseason games? This advent of joint practices and more and more clubs looking to do those, usually for their ones to play in those as opposed to playing in the preseason game. What does that mean for the preseason game as a fan value? Is it continued to diminish? Arguably, yes. Is there a way to structure this so that the veterans are getting the time necessary to play and get ready for the season, which they need and all the research shows they need to reach speeds and intensities and practice to prevent injuries when they get to the regular season and yet allow for rookies and undrafted free agents and others to learn because we hear about that from the coaches all the time.

21:21John:I don't get my hands on the players enough. There's more to do. You need to look at all of that. And I think in an 18 and two version of the NFL, should we get there eventually, there can be a lot of changes that we can make to that entire dynamic that's going to make the sport better and safer. And of course, an 18th regular season game might be very exciting for the fans, but we have to do it right. And I think that the amount of work that goes into it that the fan doesn't see, It's not just scheduling a stadium for one more week or this vision of playing the Super Bowl on President's Day weekend, which by the way, we do next year.

21:49John:We're going to have a 3-day weekend next year, which everybody's going to get very excited about, including me. It's not as easy as that. There's so much that goes into it on the broadcast side, on the stadium side, on my team on health and safety to best understand how to do this in the most appropriate way that part of this, hey, look, it's not inevitable, which is what the commissioner said at his press conference, I think is accounting for don't give short strip to the amount of work that has to go into getting this right.

22:15Jeff Miller:You brought up a point of like, why are we still doing training camp the way we've been doing it back in the 1970s? How does that change? In your mind, what does a new training camp look like? I'll give you one really specific example of something that we introduced just a couple

22:32John:of years ago. some of our epidemiologists took a look at the injury data and we see the most injuries, specifically lower hamstring strains, calf strains, adductor strains, twisted ankles, all that kind of stuff. The most intense time for those set of injuries is right at the beginning of training camp those first 10 days. First 10 days. And so what can you do about it? Well, we instituted an acclimation period. First, before you can put your helmets on, you have to, you have a series of days where you're on field for a little bit, a little bit more, a little bit more. We track using artificial intelligence and other things, the loads that the players put on themselves or the coaches put on the players, you track that and all that.

23:07John:And then you put the helmets on and you re-acclimate yourself. So you go back stepwise up for the next few days. We saw a decrease in hamstring strains by 25 % in the first two years. And the recurrence of those, because we all know we have players on our favorite teams, they're like, he's had that hamstring since August. It flared up again in week three, it flared up again in week 10. The recurrence rate of that dropped off a cliff too. So just using some basic tools to understand how players work, you can create or phase in or change, depending on the individual, a 10-year veteran versus a rookie, a more appropriate training camp to get them to the game speeds that they need.

23:40John:And hopefully, and I think I really believe this, decrease a number of unwanted injuries and maximize the amount of time on field without increasing the amount of time by Jill.

23:50Jeff Miller:I know it's part of your title. How much time do you spend on player safety in your day-to-day job?

23:56John:It's a passion for me. So my free time usually heads in that direction. But I have responsibilities across the board. And we have great teams of engineers, a great chief medical officer, great epidemiologists who are much smarter and more conversant in the stuff than I am. But yeah, I'd like to spend a good amount of time on it.

24:14Jeff Miller:Is the kickoff working? The new kickoff? Yeah, you know, it is. I don't know what I'm talking about now, but then I see the rate of concussions is going back up? Yeah, yeah.

24:23John:I'll give you the whole thing on that. So there were two goals with the kickoff, as fans certainly saw this year. The two goals were, one, bring the special teams, in this case, the kickoff back into the game. Secondly, try to do it in a way that the injury rate is similar, more similar to a runner pass play. Because historically, the old kickoff play, the injury rate on the kickoff was somewhere between two and four times a runner pass play, up to four times on a concussion. No surprise why, the amount of space and speed. And so those collisions were really substantial for the ball carrier and for the tackler with these tremendous athletes who can run at incredible rates of speed, therefore making the closing velocities very high and leading to a lot of injuries.

25:04John:So we changed it by minimizing the space and hopefully decreasing the speeds. That was really it in a nutshell. The return rate's up to about 75%, which was up from 32 % a year ago. So two point, whatever that That is 2.3, 2.4 times, which is great. More kicks returned for touchdowns in years. We saw one in the playoffs. Rashid Shahid brought one back for Seattle. It changes the whole tenor of games. More long kickoffs. All of that's great. The rate of injuries overall decreased substantially. Rate of injuries overall, much closer to a runner pass play. Not there yet. Concussions decreased some over that period of time, but we think there's more work to do.

25:40John:And so we're going to spend time with special teams coaches, head coaches, the competition committee in the next month. this is when people say, what happens? What do you do after Super Bowl? That's what we do. That's what we do. So we'll be with the competition committee at length in combine saying, what if we move these players here? What if we did this? What if we enforce these rules differently? How do we decrease some of those high speed collisions? Because there still are some we're better than we were before, but not as good as we want to be. You know what my, my solution is just get rid of it.

26:06Jeff Miller:Just, is that your thing? Start on the 25 and just, you wouldn't just go. No, I don't, I don't miss it at all. No. You think most fans feel that way? Uh, I'm, I'm, I think I'm unusual.

26:14John:I don't know. I think fans love the kickoff. I think they do. It's not just, it used to be ceremonial. It was like, why at that rate would we keep it? And so we wanted to make changes and the coaches wanted to make changes to bring it back in the game. And I understand the change we made is relatively radical to the eye, but it seems to be working. And I know the players, when asked about it, have been overwhelmingly supportive of it because, hey, it brings a play back into the game. A lot of the younger guys on the roster frequently play that position and they can earn themselves more playing time.

26:41John:So it's a road towards a longer career, which is great. We do want to tweak it. We always said it's going to be a work in progress because you can model it using AI on a computer, which we did for years. We ran simulations of that play tens of thousands of times to try to understand what the injury rate would be, the likelihood of strategies around it, the likelihood that you would get long returns. And we did pretty well with the model, but we knew that we'd have to come back to it because the human eye and innovation is different from a computer and coaches have different ways of seeing things.

27:10John:So it's going to continue to be a point of conversation.

27:12Jeff Miller:This is my 21st Super Bowl. I've been coming for quite a while. Yeah. And the talk, when was the talk about concussions? It was like about five, six, six years ago. Probably more, yeah. There was not one question on player health and safety or concussions during the commissioner's press conference on Monday. Yeah. Which is to say it's not an issue. No. But what is the one change that has been instituted that you think is causing this to not appear to be as much of an issue anymore?

27:48John:I don't think there's any one thing. I think there's a couple. But the primary point is that we can do things with technology now that we couldn't do 10 years ago. We understand what happens on fields in ways that were impossible from a technology perspective years ago. Just to give your listeners a little bit of an insight, not only do we have however many dozens of cameras that we have around every NFL stadium, forget Super Bowl, which has even more, but your average one o 'clock Sunday game has dozens of cameras with frame rates that are exceptional. We also have trackers, chips in the shoulder pads of each and every player, GPS locators.

28:26John:So based on that technology alone and nothing else, we know how fast every... You've seen it on broadcast. You know how fast the players are running. We also know because we can break down on a frame by frame basis when they get hurt, whether it be a high ankle sprain, you know, and we can go into hip drop tackle and that kind of stuff that people talk about, or whether it be a concussion. We know everything about that from a biomechanical perspective. Where was the player hit? At what speed? What position was he playing? How much does he weigh? What equipment was he wearing? What's the play type?

28:50John:How many injuries he had previously? On and on and on into maybe 150 different variables, which we chart. And so the ability to do that and then share that information in this case with AWS, who came to us and said, hey, look, we can help you address some of this by using computer vision, artificial intelligence, taking this huge data set based on a couple thousand concussions and understanding what causes them, what's the most frequently likely occurrence. every player suffers them differently, right? An offensive lineman and a wide receiver to playing two very different games, right? Wearing the same equipment.

29:25John:We've been able to take a lot of that and share a lot of the research with helmet companies. And so the helmets are improving dramatically. They're not what players 10 years ago wore and every year they get better. We're being better. I look at some of those games from the seventies. And first of all, they're playing on concrete. For sure, the surface, no question. And if you look inside that helmet, with the padding isn't what it was and the materials are different around it and we've eliminated a number of different block types right forget about like the leg whip and that and the head slap which used to exist in the 70s i mean talking about like blindside blocks and wedges and leading to the change on the kickoff play and defenseless receiver all of us have watched the evolution of this over time and it's incredibly gratifying on a personal level to say to be in the middle of some of this to see how the league as a whole including the players association who have been great partners, by the way, and a shout out to all the people on their side who have worked on this, to see how we've been able to take technology and data as we've been able to identify it and use it in ways that actually affects the game on the field.

30:26John:You think about other sports, they don't change rules. We change rules every single year, primarily to advent safety for the sport. People can talk about roughing the quarterback, or they can talk about the defenseless receivers, or they can talk about using your head to initiate contact. Those are all things that the health and safety side promotes. But you know what? Last year, we had the lowest concussion rate in the history of the NFL as long as we've been able to track this. I can't tell you the number of players who say, if I could play again under this set of rules and only one contact practice a week and all those other things and wearing the equipment we're wearing, I wouldn't have retired when I retired.

31:01John:It's better for the players. And I think the sport has been better too from an excitement perspective. Everybody else can be their own judge of that. You can change and make this sport better and will continue to without taking anything away from the nature and the excitement and vitality of the sport.

31:15Jeff Miller:What's a change that you mentioned AI. I mean, it's changing so quickly. What's a change that you expect to see within the next five years, two years in the NFL that we're not seeing right now?

31:28John:Yeah, you're starting to see a little bit of AI. You saw the placement of the ball and whether then the first down marker. You saw that that's an AI generated technology. much like tennis uses to sort of identify with the balls. That doesn't deal with ball placement. There's deals where it is in relation to the first down marker. I think we're going to be able to use AI to better understand objective decisions made on fields and be able to make those decisions faster. The kind of thing that you get when you see the replay, but an official may not be able to see in the moment, was his foot out of bounds?

31:56John:Did the ball get across the goal line? All of that, where there's 12 men on the field, did somebody move too early? All that kind of stuff. There's no reason to think that we can't train computers in real time to be able to identify these things for us and help us officiate the game both more accurately and more efficiently not that our officials don't do a great job that's not really the point just to make it quicker it's

32:17Jeff Miller:it's no question the most frustrating part of watching an nfl game is waiting for the the

32:21John:official review in my well especially if you see it and you're like you see the the the review five seconds later and like well his foot was out of bounds and now you're just waiting i'll even push

32:28Jeff Miller:back on that you know what frustrates me i've been watching the nfl for 50 years and i don't know what a catch is still and and it's like so it's like you're looking you're like i don't know how

32:39John:they're going to call that because and it's incredibly difficult because when we see it now as you're sitting on your couch at home and you see every frame and you see it from every angle which as we know didn't exist not so very long ago and the officials got his shot at looking at it and and again he and they men and women do you know terrific work on field but commissioner talked about this at his press conference and i think this is this is part of what the ambition would be to the question that you asked about AI. Are there fouls in the game, misses, that occur maybe in the last two minutes of a quarter or a half or a game that could change the outcome of the game that with the advent of technology, AI or higher speed computers and frame rates or whatever it is, that we can see faster and change?

33:24John:We don't currently throw flags on the field. Officials throw flags on the field and replay assist can help review those and decide, hey that was a mess pick the flag up then you got it wrong or hey the ball should be on the 38 yard line not the 39 that's where the ball went out of bounds which is great right to be more accurate but we don't allow any we don't allow anybody except play uh officials on the field to throw a flag are there cases did they miss a face mask should you know and and their view is obstructed

33:49Jeff Miller:but everybody else in the world saw it yeah why is that not reviewable yeah it shouldn't be

33:53John:reviewable we have to have that conversation with the competition committee and with coaches and i think that the advent of technology, AR otherwise, is allowing that to happen. And I think we're going to start to see a fair amount of that. Certainly that conversation is going to heat up. I'm a proponent on the safety fouls because I want to eliminate the sort of helmet-to-helmet contacts that are more likely to cause injury for players. And if you saw that kind of thing and a flag wasn't called, should we be able to correct it? I think it's a worthwhile conversation.

34:19Jeff Miller:Although, you know, because I'm a journalist, I only see red flags. You're going to call back a touchdown because there was like holding at the line? It's exactly the right question.

34:29John:Right? You see holding, because once you look at one thing, you look at everything. Yeah. Right? And so what is the line to draw? And I think that's exactly the right way to sort of figure it out. And the answer to it, I think is, okay, well, we have to have an honest conversation about that. And then like anything, you're going to learn as you go. You're not going to call it perfectly the first time through. It's not possible to do that. And to have that number of officials, all with all this great training and experience, to have a similar, almost objective view of how to call these sorts of things doesn't happen overnight.

35:01John:We're humans at the end of the day. We want the humans aided by technology to the extent possible, not replaced by them.

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36:15Jeff Miller:The question that came up most during the commissioner's press conference, four questions came regarding the Rooney Rule. And there seems to be, there doesn't seem to be, there is a lot of frustration that the rule's not working. You had 10 head coach job openings this season so far. None of them filled by an African-American. What can you do to make the Rooney Rule have more teeth?

36:45John:I think you have to look at it as the Rooney Rule is a tool, but it's not the entire toolbox. So the Rooney Rule has changed over the years, as you know, and our viewers know, fans know, that having people of color as part of an interview process has been terrific. that's been adopted by industries around the country, around the world to try to find the best and most diverse, potentially, employees. And I think that the Rooney rule over that period of time, Commissioner spoke to this, has made us a stronger league. And it has enabled people who are really capable of sitting in seats where they didn't otherwise have that opportunity.

37:33John:If you look holistically, there's no question that the diversity of coaches along an NFL sideline is more diverse than it was, say, 10 years ago. And if you look at any one year of coach hires and you only look at the head coach, I'm not sure that that's the best metric. Let's look at coordinators. Let's look at other coaches who are growing up the ranks. and the other tools that I referred to earlier, in addition to the Rooney Rule, these programs like accelerators where we'll have another one at Combine and then another one in May at an owner's meeting, which some of them were originally designed so that owners, the people making the decision, the owners of the club were meeting candidates and might not otherwise have met during the course of their day and being able to say, okay, here's so-and-so who happens to be a person of color.

38:19John:I remember meeting him at this event. Now that I have an opening for an offensive coordinator, why don't we bring him in and let's talk to him? And I think that that has all proven useful, but that doesn't mean that you stop innovating or relooking at any of those programs or policies to say, well, this was working and your question is the right one. And the question asked at the press conference is the right one to say, well, was this year a success? It does tell you, you need to go back and look at everything again and say, what is the goal here? The goal is to have the best possible workforce.

38:48John:And that requires pulling on the most diverse group of people. The more people who are going to be involved in the NFL, the better off that we're going to be in any number of roles, men, women, people of color, not all of that. So what can we do to make sure that we're getting access to those people and those people have an opportunity? And so Commissioner talked about relooking at the renewing. I think we'll relook at all the things that we do to see if those programs, policies, opportunities are creating the kind of opportunities that we're hoping for.

39:13Jeff Miller:What's the view inside the NFL? Was this a blip? Was it a one-year anomaly.

39:19John:I don't think I can speak for the whole league on that point in terms of, again, your specific question that goes to the head coaches, because I do think you need to take a look at the broader view here. I mean, whether it be the sidelines or whether it be the NFL's office, it is more diverse and we have access to more different candidates than we've ever had before. And so all of those policies that apply to a team hiring somebody, we're applying internally. And we're interviewing diverse candidates and that's leading to diversity, which makes us stronger, as we've said repeatedly. So whether it turns out to be a blip or whether it turns out to be part of a continuum where it's not fair to judge on a year-by-year basis, but you have to look at all of it over time and look at every position over time and make sure that there is a pipeline of candidates, both diverse and not, who are great quality and are going to rise up in the NFL and lead us into the next decade.

40:16John:I think you need to take a look at that, like I said, holistically, and that's a conversation we're going to be taking very seriously, I imagine, as soon as Super Bowl's over, we get back to the office. We only have

40:28Jeff Miller:about five minutes left, and I haven't brought up sports betting or the predictions market. I know. In fact, not one question to the commissioner about this either. um uh before we get into the predictions market um uh the embrace and when i say say that the league has embraced sports betting do you does that make you yeah it gives me hives it does yeah

40:53John:the the acceptance of sports betting okay yeah i'll i'll take that has that been a success i think it has i think it's been a necessity uh look i you mentioned i used to work in the washington office one of the things that i did when i was you know early on working for the league was, I remember I went to the state of Delaware that was looking to pass a law to permit sports betting. They were one of a few states that was in an odd category that could restart it, that wasn't affected by PASPA, which was the law that was eventually overturned. And that was the NFL's position. We filed briefs against overturning PASPA with the Supreme Court.

41:25John:We wanted to ensure, as we continue to do, that the integrity of the game is the foremost principle. But here we are, 39 states and the District of Columbia have legalized sports betting. Obviously, technology has allowed a lot more of it because you can press a couple of buttons on your phone. And so we spend an enormous amount of time trying to make sure that we do two things. One, most importantly, protect the integrity of the game and to ensure that consumers are protected too, right? Real-time data, genuine sources, not phony information. We educate, our compliance group educates 20 ,000 people annually.

42:01John:So not just coaches and players and league employees at the clubs and all the others, but officials and doctors and trainers and broadcast partners. It goes on and on and on because this is such a dynamic environment. Part of the strategy has always been the more that we can understand about what's happening in the marketplace, the better off we are in creating the policies and programs and educational systems to prevent the risks that come with it. And so people say, hey, but you partnered with, insert name here. and say, yeah, you know, and it's helped us get access to understanding what the market is.

42:35John:And we get real-time information that I don't, security people do, right? And there is a mandate to share this information with state regulators or others. So that for our things that are happening that would cause us pause or otherwise violate our rules, there's awareness, whether it be by us or state regulators and others. And so we educate, we partner, we try to learn as much as we can. And when the laws have passed in the various states, we've lobbied to make sure that the parts that protect the integrity of the game are part of those laws and the parts of protect consumers are part of those laws and that there is insight into them.

43:04John:It's not foolproof, but that is a risk. And we have nothing more than the integrity of the game when it comes down to it. And so trying to find ways to do that means that we're spending a great deal of time doing it. Is it a fan engagement tool? Sure. And I think that's really important on the other side of the balance here. But where I live on the part where there's compliance and concern and the state laws have to be what they need to be. Incredibly serious effort to try to get that right.

43:29Jeff Miller:When you see some of these scandals happen in some of the other leagues, NBA, MLB, is your reaction like you're holding your breath? You have to learn from those, right? Well, I think what people in the gambling business would say is like, it's sunshine. We rooted it out and in a weird way, they feel good about it.

43:53John:Here's another example. We've been there, John. We've suspended players. We have fired employees. It's all a matter of public record when we've seen violations of our rules. And we don't have to go back to that to show whether they were inadvertent or whether they were malicious. We can enforce those. And when other sports have issues, we look at it too. For example, the conversation around profits became substantial in the wake of the NBA and MLB. Look, we don't permit those type of one player, one outcome bets. And when we engage with our betting partners, we ensure that that's the case because we think that there is risk there.

44:31John:Are we going to get smarter as more happens and as betting continues to evolve and as prediction markets, whatever they are, seem to be coming into the marketplace? We're going to have to continue to evolve and innovate because the world's evolving. I like that you said prediction markets, whatever they are, what are they that's a good question they're not regulated yet right um we have submitted testimony spoken

44:53Jeff Miller:publicly about this nbc does not have any prediction market ads advertising they don't

44:57John:was that that was that a nfl influence so it is an influence by the nfl yeah um it goes back to it goes back to the fact that consumer protections and protections to the integrity of the game where's the data coming from um what about you know bets like is somebody going to suffer a concussion, those sorts of things that are just not acceptable? What are being done to protect our fans and consumers? And who's enforcing any of that? What's the discipline for that? And it's not mature yet. Yet, one hopes it gets to that place. I know the federal government is taking a look at it. Certainly, a number of states have sued some of these companies to try to enforce their laws.

45:36John:We, as the company that puts on the sport, has to be aware and involved in all of this because we have to protect, at the end of the day, the integrity of the game that's going to be first, second, and third priority. And so will this continue to all be an active conversation? I have no doubt that it will, but everybody should know where we come from on this, which is to say, we want the same protections we get with the legalized sports betting companies in whatever the world looks like, because it matters to us. This is who we are. Jeff Miller, can't thank you enough.

46:05Jeff Miller:Enjoy Super Bowl week. Thanks, John.

46:10Jeff Miller:So I want to thank Jeff Miller for joining the pod this week. And thanks also to the NFL's awesome communications executive, Alex Reithmiller, for all his help in setting this up. More importantly, though, I want to thank you for listening to The Varsity, an Odyssey podcast in partnership with Puck. I also want to thank the executive editors from Puck. That's Gabby Grossman, Ben Landy, John Kelly, and the great team from Odyssey, Bob Tabador and Patrick Antonetti, and our new partners with Nesson, Greg Poth and Mark Merlock. If you like this podcast, make sure to sign up for my newsletter, also called The Varsity.

46:42Jeff Miller:head over to putt.news and use the code word the varsity all one word for a 20 discount and i will see you on sunday

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