The future of sports looks more like a "Terminator" movie than you'd ever expect. The future of sports might look like this: Cyborgs run amok to win a Super Bowl, virtual reality comes to your TV so you can live the game. While maybe not that extreme, technology is becoming heavily integrated into the world of sports.
While many sports fans including myself welcome and encourage this increased presence of technology, others fear that it might turn the highs and lows of a winning season into the plot of a science fiction movie. This is such a polarizing issue because all sports fans have one thing in common— passion. It’s that undying passion that makes sports fans so adamant about what they believe the role of technology should be.
One new example of how technology is being used in sports is the NFL’s “Next Gen Stats” project. Beginning this season, all NFL players are going to have “bottle cap size" RFID chips attached to their shoulder pads. The data collected by these chips will enable fans to track every player’s on-field movement in real-time via the “NFL 2015” app for Windows 10 and Xbox One.
ASU is well aware of how important this growth of data analysis in sports is. Last March, five students from ASU’s business analytics master’s program competed in the Society for American Baseball Research's Diamond Dollars Case Competition, in which they took on the task of determining what the most beneficial trade would be involving Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels.
The use of technology in sports is nothing new. The NFL has had instant replay challenges since 1999. Broadcasters have been using the “yellow line” to identify the first down threshold since 1998.
Even after having considered the benefits of technology in sports, there are still some romanticized traditions that sports fans, collectively, are unwilling to change. For instance, for years, baseball fans have had the ability to objectively know whether a pitch is a ball or a strike.
In July, a computerized system was used to identify balls and strikes at a minor league baseball game in San Raphael, California. Former Arizona Diamondbacks player Eric Byrnes acted as the human umpire, reading the robot’s calls off of a screen. The crowd didn’t take kindly to the experiment. That’s because purist baseball fans cling to the idea of having a man wearing a mask and a giant chest protector stand behind home plate, screaming, “Strrrriiikkee.”
Of course, the umpire is going to miss some calls under that system, but baseball fans are fine with that. When he gets the call wrong, the manager of the team that believes the team got ripped off. He then jumps out of the dugout, runs out onto the field, instigates a shouting match with the umpire and gets thrown out of the game. It’s all part of the tradition, and fans like that.
Sport is an institution that is always evolving. If sports had never been given the chance to grow and change, we wouldn’t even be watching football in the first place; we’d be watching the game’s grandfather: soccer. If people always viewed sports as some kind of immutable pastime that was born perfect and never needed any improvements of any kind, we wouldn’t today have the luxury of being able to go see the Diamondbacks or Cardinals under the bright stadium lights at night, in the comfort of an air conditioned building, with a roof over our heads to protect of from thunderstorms and haboobs. If technology wasn’t allowed to have a role in sports, we wouldn’t be able to have ice rinks in Arizona to host games for the Coyotes, or ASU’s NCAA Division I ice hockey team. It’s sports’ flexibility to evolve that makes it such a long-lasting tradition.
Reach the columnist at cmfitzpa@asu.edu or follow @CodyFitzStories on Twitter.
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
Want to join the conversation? Send an email to opiniondesk.statepress@gmail.com. Keep letters under 300 words and be sure to include your university affiliation. Anonymity will not be granted.
Like The State Press on Facebook and follow @statepress on Twitter.
