By Scott Graber
It is Thursday, and it is early. This morning I have my coffee (Peet’s Big Bang) and the realization that football is back.
This past Saturday, the University of South Carolina lost to Vanderbilt; Clemson lost to Georgia Tech; and The Citadel’s Bulldogs lost to Gardner Webb’s Bulldogs.
Despite this losing record, I am still drawn to the game (on television) because of the unpredictability as demonstrated by Buffalo’s last-second win over Baltimore on Sept. 7.
I was pulling for the Baltimore Ravens — my Citadel classmate, Bill Stansbury, is a Ravens fan, and I knew his eyes and ego were glued to this game. But in the fourth quarter, with less than 5 minutes left on the clock, the Buffalo Bills engineered a 16-point comeback that was, by any measurement, stunning.
This five minutes — deeply disturbing and disappointing for my classmate — was the reason that most American men sit in front of a television monitor from Saturday at noon to Sunday at midnight. This five minutes of elemental, unexpected electricity is what separates American football from just about every other five minutes in the American Experience.
Notwithstanding this five-minute experience, we read (in The New York Times) that most college and professional football coaches are looking at Artificial Intelligence to make the game more predictable.
Now, to be clear, current rules prevent the use of Artificial Intelligence during the game. During the game head coaches rely upon their offensive and defensive “coordinators” to tell them what to do next.
We have this person — who sits high above the playing field — who dials-up mathematical probabilities (analytics) and calls down a particular play to the anguished, often-confused, obscenity yelling coach who is pacing up and down the sidelines.
Because the defensive team’s player distribution — the “zone” or “man-to-man” coverage can be changed at the last minute — there is usually a back-up play that must be conjured-up by the offensive coordinator and sent down to the quarterback on the field.
The details of these “analytics” are well-kept secrets that necessarily involve individual matchups (of opposing players) that complicate the play-calling process of the young, buzz-cut, appropriately logoed men in the booth.
“By watching physical exertion, movement and play tendencies, coaches can make comparisons that predict how a player will interact with another player.”
Recently, The New York Times wrote that Artificial Intelligence cannot yet understand football. However, the article indicated that it is, as we speak, learning about football by collating billions of bits of data that exist in videotape, television, essays and grainy film footage.
“The large language models that power most AI and machine learning don’t know how to watch football yet, but I think with some work, they can be taught to watch football,” said Udit Ranasaria, a senior researcher at SumerSports, one of the handful of companies developing Artificial Intelligence tools with the potential to reshape professional football.”
The New York Times says, however, that Artificial Intelligence can “concurrently identify coverages, adjust as players move around, and is very good at piecing together relationships in very, very high dimensional spaces …”
I’m not sure what a “very, very high dimensional space” is, but Gordon Hill, a coach who once played safety for the Los Angeles Chargers, told me that AI is surely being used during the week.
“It’s being used for things like self scouting’” he told me.
What is self scouting?
“Let’s say we have a game with the Eagles and we want to know how we dealt with a third-and-7 situation in the past.”
“Using AI we can analyze what plays we called. What our tendencies were in those situations. What play the Eagles think we’re going to run in that situation.”
“We can analyze our own tendencies; and break away from those tendencies,” he said.
I asked Gordon if the NFL can really keep AI out of an on-going game — when the defensive coordinator would simply have AI “read” the coverage?
“I don’t think there is enough time,” he said. “The other team can camouflage their coverage until the last minute. And communication is cut-off 15 seconds before the snap. AI doesn’t have enough time to “read” the coverage, or to figure out the adjustment that will happen just before the snap.”
I am old, tired and suspicious of computers. But I think keeping a human being — with all of his experience, intuition and instincts in the play-calling process — is a good thing.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
