A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Gary Brantley literally wrote the book on organizational transformation, and anyone who cracked its spine will understand why he joined the NFL as its new CIO last year and did nothing.

Rather than detail an immediate list of objectives, he embarked on a listening tour. Brantley met with every department of the league’s sprawling operations, spending enough time with each to understand the nuances of their roles. He spoke to the technology leaders at the NFL’s 32 franchises to learn their local issues and considerations.

Now, 12 months after taking the job, Brantley’s early initiatives are taking shape. Chief among them is the creation of an NFL Innovation Hub that seeks “to create a culture of innovation, cross-functionally and across the league, that allows us to operationalize ideas fast,” he said.

Guided by what he spent the past year hearing, Brantley has also played a role in streamlining efficiency, hiring three new roles in his department, creating a council to study artificial intelligence, helping the implementation of an updated credentialing system that uses facial recognition and introducing a concept that’s been called “Football as a Service.”

In his 2019 book — The Art of Organizational Transformation: 7 Steps to Impact & Influence — he wonders aloud why leaders are in such a rush to make changes ‘without being a part of the entity long enough to understand the true internal needs.’

“The first thing I’m trying to do is really understand how the organization operates,” Brantley said in a series of conversations with Sports Business Journal. “I don’t want to hear anything about tech — I’ll get to that at some particular point — but, how do you operate as an organization? What do you care about the most? What makes you go? How do you create revenue? All those types of things are interesting to me. And then I try to surround tech around it to be a support function for what the organization is trying to accomplish.”

Over the past quarter-century, Brantley has worked for big tech companies such as IBM and MCI WorldCom, founded his own faith-based media site, led technology at multiple levels of government — the state of Ohio, the city of Atlanta and the school system of Georgia’s DeKalb County — and then worked in the C-suite of a large home construction company.

Image courtesy of the NFL.

Raised in Youngstown, Ohio, the son of a 30-year AT&T veteran, Brantley hails from a high-achieving family: His three siblings include a doctor and two attorneys.

These experiences have shaped Brantley. He is the rare technologist well-versed in bureaucracy, an innovator committed to efficiency, the entrepreneur with a long tenure in the public sector and the business leader who can roll up his sleeves and code — not to mention an accomplished drummer with an enviable collection of Jordans and a sub-two-hour half-marathoner who commutes to league headquarters on an electric scooter.

His hiring in October 2022 came at the end of a lengthy search, following Michelle McKenna’s departure as NFL CIO in March that year, but Brantley’s fit for the post quickly became apparent once he applied.

“When I interviewed him, I was like, ‘He gets it,’” recalled NFL Chief Administrative Officer Dasha Smith, noting his “understanding that you have a lot of key stakeholders, and every single one of them is very important. It’s really about consensus building.

“I knew within 10 minutes that Gary, honestly, was the one — based on his experience, based on being a real technologist, his humility, which is something that is really unique for someone who’s as talented as he is, and then he’s a sports fan, so that was good.

“He really just checked every single box.”

■ ■ ■ ■ ■

The IT department of some organizations is relegated to the same status as referees and umpires, in that they’re only noticed when there’s a problem. At the NFL, that expectation of smooth operation without drawing attention to itself is very much there — but that’s only one part of a broad remit that also includes everything from HR and payroll to player health and safety and the searchability of the NFL Media archives.

“We have no room for failure on the technology front,” Smith said. “A lot of people don’t see all the pipes behind the scenes that go into making sure that that you and I can watch the game, that the coaches can talk to the quarterbacks on the field, that their Microsoft Surfaces are all working correctly. We cannot have any points of failure, so first and foremost, making sure that the game could be played flawlessly. Every single game.”

But, she continued, technology is also a strategic priority with the NFL wanting to continue as a leader in the space. That’s what lured Brantley to the role; he describes himself as “a creator and more of a business entrepreneur than, I would say, a traditional tech guy. I see myself as a business guy who just understands tech really, really well.”

“Technology needed to be a core component of the organization that I was working for, not just a back office support organization, not just a cost center. I wanted an opportunity to really use technology to be able to affect positive outcomes,” Brantley said.

The NFL’s Deputy CIO, Aaron Amendolia, is a long-tenured member of the department who admitted that “every time you have a new leader come in, you’re always holding your breath about what’s this is going to be like, and it’s been refreshing,” he said, noting “Gary’s focus as a leader is always on communication and transparency.”

Together, they’ve endeavored to reconsider the role of the department. Messaging is important. The final chapter of Brantley’s book, after all, is titled Shaping and Controlling the Narrative. Along with adding a vice president of IT business services and posting for a vice president of football technology, Brantley hired the department’s first communications professional, to help craft storytelling.

“When you’ve been here for a while just doing IT for operational sake, you just do the operations, and you’re more attached to the systems than the outcome of what the systems do,” Amendolia said. “We’re actually tying to [ourselves] some of these business objectives and goals. That’s what we think will really change the perspective of IT from being this cost center and as being an operational back-of-house type of service to a strategic partner with the league.”

The Innovation Hub is the most concrete example. It’s a common platform within Fortune 500 companies but new to sports. The Hub is a way to standardize the process of ideating, monitoring and measuring progress. Major partners, such as Amazon, Microsoft and Verizon, are invited to collaborate, but it also can be used for crowdsourcing solutions, much as the NFL has found success with the Big Data Bowl and its health and safety competitions.

The idea germinated last spring, recalled Jason Dvorkin, AWS principal industry specialist for media, entertainment and sports, after Brantley gave a presentation on innovation at the National Association of Broadcasters conference. Conversations grew from there about how to shape this idea what Dvorkin described as Football as a Service — to take media and data such as the NFL Next Gen Stats and “make that all available in a centralized way, so that whoever needs it at whatever point in time in the process has a way to access it,” Dvorkin said. N-Ovate Solutions is spearheading implementation of the Hub.

Brantley then went out to build support, counting 39 meetings over six months. This is where politics, salesmanship and charisma become important.

“You can build and spend all types of money on technology, and no one really adopts the change. And that’s what you don’t want. And so everything about aspects of innovation, change, the ability to move the needle — it’s all people-focused,” he said, adding, “If you can go and you can approach it in a way that they don’t feel like it’s being forced on them, but they also feel like they had a piece and a part in it, it really helps us to speed things up.”

The conceit is to flip around the old truism that one has to hurry up and wait for other necessary pieces to fall into place for a project to move forward. Instead, it’s about waiting for the right idea and then hurrying up its completion.

“His vision is around trying to find the technology of the future and not make a snap decision. He’s looking five years out, 10 years out,” Dvorkin said.

“And he’s using us and our experience to help shape that operation. I mean, you look at what’s been done in player health and safety right now, using computer vision to create that Digital Athlete. He’s realizing that there’s more to that than just injury prevention. It’s: How do we start to coach the game of football better? How does that provide insights into the lower levels of the game to help cultivate and foster that next fan, to actually become passionate and deeply invested in the league?”

But innovation isn’t strictly relegated to the transformational ideas, either. Amendolia emphasized the importance of back-end efficiency to free up resources and time.

Brantley noted that it’s common for large organizations to be unaware of their redundancies or the full capabilities of their tools. He undertook a process called application rationalization, a mechanism of modern IT management to assess their software portfolio. He said they’ve identified 419 applications across the league, of which 40% show some redundancy. Different departments, for example, might use Microsoft Teams or Slack or Zoom for communications.

Aligning the league on shared platforms can be a major boon, though he acknowledged the importance of a multicloud environment and noted that compartmentalization is good — a point driven home during his time in Atlanta.

■ ■ ■ ■ ■

When Brantley arrived in Atlanta, the city was in turmoil. In March 2018, the capital of Georgia was stricken by a brazen ransomware attack, and it was still reeling from the consequences of that when Brantley took over as CIO in October of that year.

He discovered that the city had only one firewall in place, which thankfully protected the world’s busiest airport, Atlanta’s Hartfield-Jackson, but most of the city’s other services were shut down. That included four or five systems each for email, customer relationship management and permits. By the time he was done, many of the solutions were consolidated, and he bequeathed the city 37 firewalls to contain any future network breaches.

“The goal was to make lasting change and to create an environment that will protect the city for years to come,” Brantley said. “There was going to be no innovating here. I had to rebuild an entire city infrastructure that was depleted. I didn’t have time for a three-year technology plan. There was a 12-month road map that was tied to making sure my team got back to general basics and general hygiene of how you operate a successful environment.

“They all knew things needed to be improved. So I knew I would get the resources and the funding that I needed to turn this around — for a short period of time. And then it would go back to what government is.”

By contrast, Brantley said, the NFL is “more nimble and flexible,” owing largely to the team owners, who have a more business and revenue-generating mindset than, say, a community-focused city council. The missions are very different, but his fundamental approach to enacting change within organizations is similar. What he said about rebuilding Atlanta’s technological infrastructure seems applicable to how he began his tenure at the NFL.

“I saw the end,” he said, “so I knew where to start.”

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

By Bobby L Scales II

When organizational change is needed it usually means something has not gone well.

Results may have slipped, your culture may have drifted. Perhaps the market is telling you there’s something you need to improve upon.

Recognizing the need for change is one thing, coming into a new environment and selling that change to the team you have inherited is quite another.

We know change is difficult. Change can illicit feelings of fear and uncertainty and when those feelings arise, as humans we naturally go back to what is comfortable and safe. The problem is that more often than not what is comfortable and safe is exactly why the change is needed. Your team may feel isolated or alienated. Even when the change is 90% good, people are going to worry about the ‘bad’ 10% and how it inevitably affects them. The leader needs to create an environment where people are willing and able to embrace change.

Leading a team or organization through times of change is a heavy lift and there is no escaping that, but there are things a leader can do to give themselves the best chance during those first 90 days and beyond.

Below is the ‘30-60-90’ model I would follow if I were leading a team or department through a period of transition and development. For the uninitiated, the 30-60-90 model divides those first 90 days into three phases where you sequentially identify your team’s issues, formulate your strategy, and begin to execute your plans.

Know your personnel

Your first 30 days should be spent asking the people around you a ton of questions. You need to have an idea of what needs to change but, in those early days, you must get a proper gage of the temperature ‘in the room’. How are people feeling? What was the sentiment of the group previously? Allow them to ask questions of you. Find out about the ‘who’ first, then you can begin to ask questions about the ‘what’. It is important to ask what happened in the past and understand why things were done a certain way before. This will inform your ideas of where you need to go. It’s impossible to do the latter until you win the people first.

In my view, this is the most difficult phase during those first 90 days because you and your staff are learning and, oftentimes, you’ll have new personnel either in management or in the rank and file – or just an entirely new group on both sides – because something has not gone to plan. You are not changing for the sake of change: you’re changing because something needs to happen in order to grow whatever group you are part of.

It is crucial to know your personnel, as former NFL Head Coach Herm Edwards memorably put it, you need to learn who is in front of you and to whom you are talking. Staff members cannot be bucketed into broad categories as you solicit their feedback. You need to understand each and every person on your team as an individual to fully understand where they fit or if you need to move on.

Identify the right people, get them in the correct seats on the bus

One thing you’ll find with long-tenured individuals is that they can become stifled or bored, which does not alter the fact that they may have some great ideas stifled because there is no real pathway for advancement and bored because there have been ideas that have been put forward and for whatever reason haven’t gone anywhere. If you have a smart and sharp talent base, you need to afford staff members the space to run with those ideas. Another way to put it is that you need to make sure that your people are sat in the correct seats on the bus.

All people want to be challenged in their job. People want to feel they can master their job and excel in their role and grow into more. As a manager, that can mean being secure in the fact that you are not the smartest person in the room. Part of the first 30 days is understanding that and then folding that into your plan.

It also speaks to your authenticity as a leader. Yes, ‘authenticity’ is a buzzword these days but, when you’re creating an environment, people want to know you are real. You have to be yourself, you have to be honest, and you have to be up front. It goes hand in hand with your integrity. People need to understand that you’re still doing the right things when no one else is watching too.

With the right questions asked of the right people, we then turn our attention to days 31 to 60. This phase is about formulating your plan and how you’re going to put all the pieces into play. Towards the end of that period you need to tell your group: ‘this is what we’ve got here and these are the answers I got from you all. This is not me making this up because I was not part of this group before. Here’s how we got here, these are the answers I’ve gotten from you and this is the path forward as I see it for this group’. You have to lay out your vision and plan for innovating or iterating in your environment and, when you have buy-in, it alleviates a lot of those questions such as ‘what’s in it for me?’

Here’s what’s in it for you: a chance to grow your career that you didn’t have before because you were stifled. You were bored and now you have the opportunity to stretch your legs and run with it.

It is also a question of communication and there also needs to be an intentionality to your strategy. There are key people you should have identified inside your department that are your influencers, people whose words and actions carry weight. It is important to communicate effectively with and through those people.

Full steam ahead

By the time you reach day 61 you’re going full steam ahead as you put your plan in place and you let your people run with it.

Your plan must also be nimble. Having a process and a framework is important but if market factors change then you will need to have the space to amend your approach. In that scenario, you need to be honest and open. You need to communicate that message in a way that is supportive rather than aggressive. Again, it comes down to communication and being genuine in gathering people’s ideas about how to remedy the situation when things are not going according to plan.

It is amazing what you can ask people to do when they feel like they are part of a team and in the know.

Main Image: Brandon Bacquie

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Ethan Joyce

You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. The Athlete’s Voice series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.

* * * * *

Vernon Davis spent 14 seasons in the NFL, totaling 7,562 yards, 583 receptions and 63 touchdowns in his professional career. The former first-round-pick (No. 6 to the San Francisco 49ers in the 2006 NFL Draft) turned Super Bowl champion (with the Denver Broncos in 2015) has pivoted into acting and investing in his post-football life.

Davis recently backed Smart Picks, a sports prediction platform that will utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict outcomes. As a subscription-based service, the AI will take factor in more than 150 variables.

Smart Picks will start with the upcoming NFL season, then will eventually expand to other professional sports.

On why he invested in Smart Picks…

Whenever I’m looking at investing, I always look at the people. That’s first and foremost. It’s just something I learned to do all the time. But you’re talking about an invention. A startup is something that changes the world. And I felt like these guys were on to something. I felt like this was something that we can really leverage when it comes to using learning algorithms to predict outcomes of sporting events, this is something unmatched.

On learning about AI and the sports-betting scene…

It’s definitely a new world. It’s different, but it shows us where the world is going when it comes to artificial intelligence. I think about four or five years from now, we’re going to see a lot more of this because it’s been proven that when it comes to AI in general, it can be really proficient and accurate in anything you wire it, program it to be proficient.

On pivoting to investment following his professional career…

Having a platform like this has been a beautiful experience for me because I didn’t come from much. I grew up in a household with six other siblings, raised by my grandparents. To be able to come from that and look at where I am now is truly a blessing. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to be able to surround myself with individuals like guys in this company — like Henry Penzi, Josh Webber and Paul Van Kleef. Because people like this can help make the world a better place and help make life great because they’re all positive and they want to do something and give back in so many different ways. So I’m extremely grateful, truly grateful for it.

On having an investment advisor or role model…

Magic Johnson was a guy who I really looked up to because he was an athlete. He wasn’t particularly a football player, but he was an athlete. So he was someone that I really looked up to. I heard about him and Starbucks (Johnson partnered with the company and facilitated the Urban Coffee Opportunities) and a lot of the business moves that he was able to make, post-career. To watch him transition the way he did and go through some of the trials and tribulations he had to face, it was truly inspiring and amazing.

On other investment projects…

There’s a lot of different things right now that I’m involved in. I have several different restaurant groups that I’m a part of in Washington, DC Big Tony’s Pizza and Dive Bar. Then we have the Cove Garden, which is next to the Nats’ stadium. I became part owner of the Brisbane Bullets basketball team (of the) National Basketball League over in Australia. I can go on and on and on. There’s a full list, but that’s just some of it. And I’m going to continue to keep going on, educate myself and learning, finding out different ways to really add to my resume, to my bottom line, and just grow in general.

On useful wearables from his playing career…

The equipment that I used was called the Q-Collar from Q30 Innovations. It was a company that was all about mitigating the impacts that you take whether you’re in practice or you’re in a game. And I thought that was very helpful to me, that technology they created, because we all know about the trauma and the history of concussions and things of that nature. Q-Collar is not there to prevent concussions, but it’s there to minimize the amount of impact you take on. Because it’s always those little things. It’s the little things in between the big things. It happens all the time. So that’s why I was very grateful to be able to be a part of that company as an investor, an ambassador and being able to wear it.

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

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Collier Madaleno recalls the story of a defensive lineman that had put on weight during the pandemic when college football was brought to a halt.

“He used that next year to really focus on nutrition,” she tells Joe Lemire and John Portch. “[He] got down and dropped his body fat percentage by 7%, lost 45lbs [20.4kg], and he was a first-round draft pick.

“He just did such a good job at buying in and it made him a faster, more explosive person. He never lost any muscle mass, which meant he was really focusing in on eating enough of just the right things so that we were able to retain that muscle and focus on losing that fat.”

Collier’s pride is palpable, particularly as a native of Athens, Georgia, and long-term Bulldogs fan. “It’s so much fun to see them buy-in and then say ‘C, I feel so much better in practice’. ‘C, I didn’t know I could have this much energy’. It’s probably the most rewarding part of my job.”

In this edition of The People Behind the Tech podcast, Collier lifts the lid on her work as the Director of Football Performance Nutrition at the Georgia Bulldogs, who retained the NCAA national championship in January.

During the course of the conversation, we covered:

• • How student-athletes are introduced to performance nutrition on campus [6:00];
  • The importance of team leaders buying into Collier’s work [11:00];
  • The question of recovery and inflammation [21:00];
  • How Collier stays current in her work [22:30].

Joe Lemire Twitter | LinkedIn

John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

Main image courtesy of Perch.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Tom Friend

University of Georgia football players, who generally grow up to become Philadelphia Eagles, credit a lot of their success to computer vision.

The days of walking around a weight room with a clipboard are long over. At Georgia — not to mention other SEC schools such as Auburn, Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Mizzou — Bulldog players got stronger and stayed fresher last season through an automated velocity-based weight training platform from the fitness tech company Perch.

Saturdays were the gamedays in Athens, Georgia, but every other day of the week for the national champions was a Perch day. The school’s 24,000 square-foot weight room contains a ‘DawgTron’, a 25-foot-by-10-foot digital screen that displays a strength and power leaderboard. That meant players could lift, but not hide — which created a competitive environment that Georgia’s lead strength and conditioning coach Scott Sinclair attributes to Perch.

“Our players now see who’s moving the bar fastest,” Sinclair says.

Perch’s premise — and now about half of the NFL teams are on board, as well — is that computer vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence can inform players of their lifting data and consequently how hard to push themselves. In theory, it’s all about the speed of a lift, which is what Perch is able to quantify and display in real time.

The company’s co-founder and CEO Jacob Rothman is a former MIT baseball player who herniated his disc while squatting in a weight room — not realizing he’d been overexerted — and brainstormed a smart gym that could reduce the risk of injury. After internships with the virtual reality company Oculus and the corporate behemoth Apple, he entered the business world as an entrepreneur and made it happen.

“This is like 2016-ish,” Rothman tells SBJ. “Wearables were really, really popular. Apple Watch had just come out. Fitbit was popular. But there was nothing that collected a similar type of data for the weight room. So how do you complete the picture? How do you provide a similar experience for the people that prefer to strength train or who are augmenting their cardio with strength training? So we kind of set out to build an experience, and we discovered that elite athletics is an amazing use case for that product. So we just started building in that direction. And you know, the rest is history.”

Perch would solve the problem of athletic load and the inherent risk that comes with it. If a player or a team had a physically taxing game or practice the day before, typically their strength coach would assign perhaps a lighter day of lifting. But with Perch, that would all be determined by lift velocity. If Perch’s numbers prove a player can’t move a barbell fast enough, it means the weight is too heavy or they’re too tired to do so. The decision can then be made to back off. But if the player is moving the weight too swiftly, then they are alerted to add more weight to optimize what can be a sterling day.

“So basically, what [Perch does] is we tell the coach how the athlete is performing, and the coach can make real time adjustments based off of that,” Rothman says. “So it really is closing that feedback loop, and what that results in is reduced risk of injury and basically like athletes getting stronger, faster. You can get a lift in, and you can guarantee that you’re not over training or under training.”

Image courtesy of Perch.

Computer vision cameras are attached, or “perched,” on top of the weight equipment, and through the machine learning and AI, can recognize and calculate the number of reps while charting the corresponding speeds of each lift. The analytics then emerge in real-time, and players can see their body outputs on a small screen or, in Georgia’s case, on the DawgTron.

MLB teams such as the Phillies leaned on it last season because, over the course of 162 games and cross-country travel, the team’s strength coaches were concerned about both muscle atrophy and exhaustion. To balance that properly — lifting without overexerting — the team leaned on Perch’s metrics.

“They wanted [Phillies] players to maintain strength or even get stronger and do that safely while in-season,” Rothman says. “So I think one of our huge benefits for baseball is managing fatigue.”

Other endurance-conscious teams such as the NBA’s Miami Heat and Orlando Magic and the MLS’s L.A. Galaxy and San Jose Earthquakes are also clients for similar reasons. But football players are still Perch’s most prominent use case. And as the season was starting last September, the company closed what Rothman called a “$4 million Seed Plus” round to help them hire a larger staff to keep up with demand.

For instance, NCAA schools such as Wake Forest, Maryland, Virginia, Duke, North Carolina, Boston College, West Virginia and Stanford have all gone public with their Perch usage, while NFL teams such as the Chargers, Patriots, Jaguars, Dolphins and Titans are also on board. Rothman hopes that perhaps the Philadelphia Eagles, Georgia’s football subsidiary, can end up joining next.

With one caveat, though. DawgTron is sold separately.

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

A Data & Innovation podcast brought to you in collaboration with

Not a member and want more content like this? Speak to our team.

“When I took over the Head Physician job at the New England Patriots, I saw a very unique opportunity to provide medical leadership at the next level,” says Dr Matthew Provencher.

“Fortunately, we had a great coach in Bill Belichick, great ownership in the Krafts, Jonathan and Robert, and I really talked to them around the facility about providing a competitive medical advantage and how we would do that.”

Provencher, who served as the Patriots’ Medical Director between 2013 and 2016 – earning a Super Bowl ring in 2014 – is the latest guest of John Portch and Joe Lemire’s on the People Behind the Tech podcast, which is brought to you by the Leaders Performance Institute and SBJ Tech.

Provencher is one of the foremost orthopaedic surgeons in the world and has treated elite athletes from across the globe at the Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colorado.

In a wide-ranging chat, we also explored:

• His time in the Navy and his work developing US Special Ops’ Tactical Athlete Program [5:00];
• Working with multidisciplinary staffs at sports teams [13:30];
• How useful the use of tech and data have been in providing medical care for athletes [20:40];
• How the nature of injury occurrences have evolved in recent years [28:30].

Joe Lemire Twitter | LinkedIn

John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

Main image courtesy of Exos.

A Data & Innovation brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

When the onset of the coronavirus pandemic shut down gyms in spring 2020, the performance coaches at Exos, like many in the sports industry, used the newfound time for R&D. Perhaps the elite training company’s most well-known business is its preparation of football draft prospects for the NFL Combine.

The type of question asked during those otherwise idle spring months was, recalled Exos VP of Performance Brent Callaway, “if we’re trying to create the fastest athletes on earth and we have anywhere from eight to 10 weeks to do it, what’s the process that we should follow?”

Across its multiple performance institutes, Exos has trained more than 1,000 athletes for the NFL since 1999, including eight No. 1 overall picks and four of last year’s top-10. For this year’s Combine, which is being held in Indianapolis, 98 of the 319 invitees prepared at Exos, most working out on location for about eight weeks.

“Everyone’s coming here to do the biggest job interview of their lives,” Exos Director of Sports Science Matt Darnell said.

Despite that pedigree of success, its staff wants to continue iterating on its program. That Covid-mandated break prompted Exos to further investigate emerging technologies, leading to several new partnerships. Introduced into the ecosystem was Vald Performance for advanced human measurements, Hologic for DXA scans and Kitman Labs to organize the voluminous datasets. Exos piloted Intel’s 3D Athlete Tracking system in 2021 and uses DARI Motion, its primary motion capture partner since 2018.

“The true magic happens when they can start to feel the customization and then the output of effort that we receive is better because they know that it’s purposeful,” said Callaway, who has personally trained a top-five pick at the Dallas-Frisco location every year since 2017. “I always tell them, within the first 14 days, with the conversations that we’re going to have, you’re going to understand your body more now than you ever have in the past.”

While many athletes who played at Power 5 schools are exposed to advanced technology and staff of innovative coaches, that’s not everyone’s experience. Back in 2015, defensive back Will Brown had competed at Division II Missouri S&T before enrolling in the Exos program. He called the training environment “eye opening” and saw immediate dividends: in two months, he added nearly 10 pounds of muscle and improved his 40-yard dash time by two-tenths of a second.

Brown likened his stint at Exos to the metamorphosis of Captain America. “When he went in the tank, and then when he came out of the tank, that’s how I like to describe my Exos experience,” said Brown, an industrial engineering graduate who returned to work at the company’s Arizona location on its research and performance innovation team.

Callaway described a “downhill slope” of technology, where methods used in the NFL trickle down to college and then to high school, so the base level of training is higher. That’s where Exos delves into personal evaluations and bespoke training plans — “adding pixels to the pictures,” as Darnell put it.

That’s where the work Exos’ interdisciplinary team of physical therapists, sports dietitians and strength coaches coordinate to maximize each athlete’s potential, testing each participant on rapid movements, range of motion, nutrition, body composition, asymmetry and hydration. Instead of this data sitting in eight siloed spreadsheets across the computers of five experts, all of it is collected in Kitman’s intelligence platform. There are built-in alerts when an athlete falls below the 50% standard at his projected NFL position, so there can be training remedies implemented.

The marquee event of the Combine each year is the 40-yard dash, where margins can be razor-thin and even savings of hundredths of seconds can be meaningful. That’s where Exos graduates excelled last year: in Callaway’s first 18 years of draft prep, he has six athletes run the 40 in under 4.4 seconds. He had six more last year alone.

“Some of it, I’m sure, is just an anomaly of talent,” he said, “but obviously there’s quite a bit of training involved here too.”

The newest area of exploration is through Hologic’s DXA scan, which can quantify body fat percentage, detect limb asymmetries and even calculate muscle-to-bone ratio. In consultation with an expert in the field named Francis Holway, Exos is seeking to prescribe ideal body masses for every individual, which may be different even among two men of the same size and same position.

“If I’ve got a 6’2” corner, and I’ve got two of them, and they both weigh 190 pounds, I would imagine their skeleton weighs the same — and that’s not what we’re finding,” Callaway said. “So you have different bone densities, you have different bone sizes, you have different limb length. And if you have an athlete who has too much mass per pound of bone, that can actually be a performance decrement.”

If there’s any one area of training that is persistently underemphasized by athletes before arriving at Exos, Brown said it’s their mobility and functional movement patterns.

“Being mindful of how to incorporate PT as a part of your plan, rather than going once it’s already got the check engine light on,” he said. “We’ve got to really keep the car with the oil and the gas on a daily basis.”

“It’s almost hard to tell where our PT clinic stops and our training floor starts,” added Darnell.

Though there are critics of the Combine — most recently, NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith called for it to be scrapped — there is underlying value in some of the datapoints collected. That enables historical comparisons to successful pros. For example, one can assess a prospect’s force plate data and his ability to accelerate and deceleration and marry that data with results in the 40, the 20-yard shuttle and the three-cone drill. (Smith advocated for union-backed regional pro days instead of the national combine.)

“Now you can go back and say, ‘OK, these athletes who tested really well on these tests all have these specific qualities,’ and it’s objective, right?” Callaway said.

“At the same time,” Darnell said of the Combine’s value, “it’s really hard to play the game of football in today’s world without having explosive speed and power and the ability to put on brakes and the ability to show up in an environment under stress, with millions of people watching you.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

By John Portch

How useful are the buzzwords and phrases that emerge as the hallmarks of great leaders?

“Everyone’s goal in team sports is to have their team perform at a high level and to get to the top of their league or division,” Jack Easterby told the Leaders Performance Institute via email.

“To do that it seems only common sense to most that there are initiatives, mantras and banner sayings that need to be uttered from the mouths of leaders upon the launch of the program for everyone to buy-in and begin to improve. After all, most teams don’t have new leaders unless the previous leadership was not executing what ownership wanted them to.”

The performance specialist, who most recently served as the Executive Vice President of Football Operations at the Houston Texans, goes further. “The truth is that most leadership sayings, catchphrases and quotes are better lived out than uttered! Good leaders know that sayings are the least of the problem when they take a new assignment.”

As Easterby said in the first instalment of our interview, asking great questions is a good starting point, but you can also rephrase those buzzwords for better effect, as he tells us here in part three.

He argues that something such as ‘work hard’ could be tweaked to ‘outwork our opponent’. “At the outset of a leadership post,” he wrote, “great leaders simply schedule work, presentations and meetings in a way that demand everyone to earn each other’s respect while working hard, and then they ask ‘did we outwork our opponent?’ which ultimately becomes a core fabric of the team and a calling card for preparation in every area.”

He later meets with the Leaders Performance Institute to build upon his point [he discusses dealing with systems failure elsewhere]. Think of it like this,” he says. “You’re at the front of a room of 300 people and you say to everybody ‘work hard’, what does that mean? It means something different to every person. You may have said something that sounds great but it means nothing. But if you say: ‘are you willing to do what’s best for the team?’ That’s a ‘yes/no’ question. Now, if someone is ducking out early or not sending you things on schedule or maybe not communicating efficiently then you’re not doing what’s best for the team. It’s clear.

“Behaviours are a lot more digestible when you’re trying to create culture than slogans. I think slogans should be later – let that come later – I think you want the beginning to be behaviours. That’s why I mentioned instead of saying ‘work hard’ you’ve got to schedule meetings to show people that you care, and they should care. The meetings should be productive, where everyone has a voice and ‘we’re all working together here, let’s go’. So when you schedule a meeting structure you are actually working hard and not just telling everyone to work hard.

“When you say ‘think about the team’ what you’re saying is that ‘if this person is not willing to stay 20 minutes extra to help break down the training room, then they don’t really care about the team’. That’s as simple as that. That’s what I was saying in my email.

“Digestible phrases are good for t-shirts and all of that stuff but, in the end, it’s behaviours – behaviours of championship culture. That’s the one you want to be able to say: ‘we have championship behaviours’ not ‘championship slogans or mantras, we have championship behaviours’. And when you do that you have a chance to win and change people’s lives.”

All that said, are there phrases he thinks resonate? “I think the unorthodox phrases are the most valuable,” says Easterby. “I think of Coach Belichick’s ‘do your job’ or I think of some of the things that happened during the course of doing business and also what potentially comes out of your mouth, not just a premeditated ‘put the team first’ or ‘teamwork makes the dreamwork’. Those things can get cheesy.

“What happens when you’ve got some things going wrong, some things going right, and you’re trying to apply some good vision and some good energy and you’ve got to go to something? For me, that was ‘it all matters’ because when you’re trying to create buy-in, a lot of times you’re standing in front of people and saying ‘guys, this is really important’ and then the next day you’re in front of them and you’re going ‘this is really important’ and then you realise ‘hey, I’ve said that nine times’. So the best thing to say is that ‘it all matters’ because now you’ve covered the gauntlet of when things are good, things are bad, when things seem small, things seem big; you’ve always said ‘it all matters’ so that was my go-to phrase because I didn’t want any body to have the premonition that something was a lot more important. The ops role is just as important as the star wide receiver and if you have equal pressure on everybody’s job then everyone will look to perform accordingly for the love of the team and the love of each other.

“But I do think the best buzzwords and the statements that are uniting come from the pressure where the leaders had to say certain things and that gave everyone a spark to rally around.”