New Florence. New Renaissance.

American football and Enterprise Applications

This is a guest column from Clive Boulton who is a football fan, consultant, prior head of development for popular MRP/ERP products including Micro-MRP, MAX at Kewill and Exact, and successive online products

Willkommen in Deutschland!

As Germans rev up for the FIFA World Cup, they will first get a dose of American Football. My team, the Seattle Seahawks will play Vinnie’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Allianz Stadium, the home ground of FC Bayern Munich on Sunday, November 13. It is the first ever NFL game played in Germany and that stadium will look just a bit different than the Bucs home stadium with its pirate ship and sea of red colors.

Since we are in SAP’s home country, it had me thinking about the complexity of this variety of football. US football’s beauty is actually in its complexity with its wide range of roles, skills and plays. Not to mention lots of technology on the field, in the review booth, in the broadcast networks and in the fan experience.

In many ways,the NFL Head Coach, is like the blend of an enterprise architect and project manager. It is a game with many resources and constraints. Each team is allowed 53 players on active roster.  Of these 53, only 46 players can dress up for the actual game. That involves navigating weekly player injuries in a sport with a lot of physical contact. On the field, each team can only have 11 players for any given play. Player substitutions are very common – within the broad categories of offense, defense and special teams. The permutations and combinations are limitless. On offense you can pass (throw) or run the ball – as a result most teams have several receivers and running backs. On defense some teams go with a 3-4 base with more linebackers than linemen. On special teams you may have 2 kickers – one more accurate to kick field goals, another to kick longer on punts.

While this may seem like the coaching team has plenty of flexibility, for each play, the referees watch for “illegal formations”. Each position calls for unique athletic abilities – wide receivers are some of the fastest athletes in the world, the kickers grow up playing more soccer than American Football, linesmen have to be strong enough to push and nullify opposing linesmen who are just as big and strong. So there is a limit to the substitutions you can make. To compensate, coaches scheme up “trick plays” to surprise the opposing team. Some of them work, some actually draw penalties and cause you to lose yardage.

The NFL has long strived to bring parity across teams and there are (more) rules for drafting new players (mostly from college teams) and trading players or coaches across teams. Similarly for each play, the refs follow a very long rule book, and throw what seems like a frustratingly large number of penalty yellow flags. Coaches, in turn, are given a quota of red flags to ask for reviews. No wonder it is a constant stop-and-go sport.

Most observers will agree the most valuable player is the quarterback who has a role in the vast majority of offensive plays. The fans in Munich will see Tom Brady, the most winning quarterback ever, with 7 Super Bowl rings and over 100,000 yards passing in his 23 seasons. In the rough and tumble sport, that kind of longevity qualifies for Superman status. Seattle has Geno Smith, in stage 2.0 of his career, who is having a phenomenal year. (Brady, on the other hand, is off to a poor year - by his high standards). It also looks like Geno will be a crowd favorite. The city has already raised several murals like this to welcome him.

Putting my architect hat on, to me the offense is like CRM in the enterprise. The quarterback. running backs and receivers are always aiming to gain yards and score touchdowns. ERP is the offensive line which does the hard work of blocking and tackling for the backs to run through gaps and give the quarterback enough time for receivers to run downfield and catch his throws

Operational systems that run on the shop floor or process insurance claims represent the defensive squad, and in many close games are even more important than the offense.

Special teams are more like MRP,  a short and decisive special planning action, to re-balance resources, reposition the offense and defense after a punt return or kick off. 

Sunday’s game sold out all 75,000 seats, Alexander Steinforth, head of NFL Germany said 3 million requests were processed when tickets for the game went on sale. You can watch the game at 3:30 CET Sunday November 13, or follow the game here. 

As you watch the game, try and map the players and formations to an enterprise architecture graph, Now imagine if those systems were to change every couple of minutes. American Football looks like chaos to the uninitiated. It’s actually a series of meticulously planned plays, interrupted by equally creative defensive plays and referees who are trying to keep the game fair but actually provide constraints to be optimized around. Think Eli Goldratt would have made a good coach?    

To conclude, American football is a game of feet and inches, a focus on the details, not dissimilar to orchestrating an SAP ERP business system. A team requires a great head coach calling the game, and the quarterback executing the calls and a number of other team members working in sync.

Just as easy as running an ERP or CRM system. Only at warp speed. And with strange language like "hut hut" and "Hail Mary".

Finland: Capital of Disc Golf world

Disc golf and woods, woods and disc golf. They were meant for each other. One such location where you can find an abundance of both of these things is Finland. They have seen a steady rise in course implementation, PDGA events, and PDGA membership since the early 2000s. Their numbers are so high that they currently hold the record for the most disc golf courses per capita. They have over 800 courses for nearly 5.5 million people (that’s one course for every 6,875 people). They also have more disc golf courses than ball golf.

Here is a TED talk on how the sport helped the country during the pandemic

 

AI and Americas Cup

In 2015, McKinsey acquired QuantumBlack, a London-based data analytics and AI specialist which had established its reputation working with F1 teams. “The New Zealand team wanted an AI that could do dynamic manoeuvres in highly variable environments, but didn’t think this was possible,” says QuantumBlack’s Nic Hohn. “Reinforcement learning really works when you’ve tried everything else.”

The McKinsey team worked with the New Zealand team for ten months during 2019 and 2020. The bots got so good that the human sailors would watch the simulations and pick up tips. “The bot was actually doing things that felt counterintuitive to the sailors,” says Jacomo Corbo, QuantumBlack’s co-founder and chief scientist, “but they’d try them out on the water and they’d actually work.”

Wired UK

 

Sporting Goods continue to evolve

With many people still working from home, athleisure has gained further ground, reflecting new attitudes toward traditional workwear. Increased health awareness has given many people a new perspective on sports and general fitness. E-commerce has thrived, as consumers continue to shop online, even as lockdown measures have eased. Digital forms of individual or community-based exercise and physical activity have become more popular and have created new possibilities for sporting-goods companies. Meanwhile, sustainability is more important than ever, with the COP26 Climate Change Conference emphasizing the need for companies to increase their efforts to decarbonize as they seek to differentiate their offerings.

McKinsey

Video on how Dick Sporting Goods continues to invest heavily in brick and mortar

 

NASCAR Next Gen Car

As the iconic Daytona 500 kicks off today, good to see NASCAR continue to innovate

"The Next Gen car, a collaboration of the brightest engineering minds in racing and the automotive industry, is designed to give the drivers greater control. It will put an emphasis back on race strategies, team personnel and vehicle setups while returning the ‘stock car’ look to NASCAR with the new Toyota TRD Camrys, Chevrolet Camaro ZL1s and Ford Mustangs. The cars, which were designed to look like the models available to fans in showrooms across the country, will utilize the latest technology to maximize performance, improve safety and provide incredible racing for fans."

Daytona International Speedway

Slowing down the game

Players stand inside a giant tent, and footballs are fired at them under different light conditions and at different speeds to help sharpen their response times. The changing light levels manipulate how fast the ball appears to be moving, making it more difficult for the visual system and brain to process a ball’s movement, pushing the delay in processing from 200 milliseconds to 250. That adds a further two metres of “blindness” to any decision an athlete makes.

Initially, that means a lot of getting hit in the head and body by wayward balls you’re unable to react to. Hladký, in his first trials with OKKULO, ended up catching some shots from OKKULO’s ball cannon with his neck. But the body adapts and recognizes it needs to take decisive action earlier. “You're constantly recalibrating your brain to interact with your environment,” says Stockman. The process becomes rewired to the low light levels—which means when you’re back in normal light, time seems to slow down and your brain makes more measured decisions about where a ball’s likely to go. “We make them see six feet better off,” says Mel O’Connor, founder of OKKULO.

Wired UK

 

SoFi Stadium - the Super Bowl venue

The venue for Super Bowl 56 is SoFi Stadium which opened last year in Inglewood, CA, close to LAX airport.

The design firm, HKS explains the design principles behind the $5 billion arena.

“SoFi Stadium’s architecture is informed by extensive research into Southern California’s industry, architecture, lifestyle, climate, geography, and landscape, combining to create an authentic Southern California expression and experience. The sweeping coastline and the beauty and strength of the Pacific Ocean contribute to the clean and dramatic curves of the stadium’s unmistakable architecture that reflects the region’s indoor-outdoor lifestyle. The stadium’s translucent roof, seating bowl, concourses and landscape were sculpted and designed to create the feel of an outdoor venue while providing the flexibility of a traditional domed stadium.

The FAA’s height restrictions, one of the project’s initial design challenges, became one of the most prominent features within the overall project: the seating bowl sits 100-feet below the existing grade – about two to three times the depth of other similar multiuse venues. To create a memorable procession experience for patrons navigating their way down to their seats and concourses, HKS demurred from the typical series of elevators, escalators, stairs and ramps, and created an indoor/outdoor meandering series of paths that guide fans through visually rich landscaped environments replete with amenities along the way.

The open-air SoFi Stadium is the first indoor-outdoor stadium to be constructed and the NFL’s largest at 3.1 million square feet (288,500 square meters). Situated under one monumental roof canopy, three state-of-the-art venues – the 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium, the 2.5-acre covered outdoor American Airlines Plaza and a 6,000-seat performance venue – can simultaneously host different events.

The stadium’s single layer ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) roof provides a guarantee, rain or shine, for the multitude of events hosted by SoFi, all while maintaining connectivity to the outdoors and flooding the venue with natural light. The ETFE film features a 65% frit pattern that shelters guests from direct sun and reduces solar gain into the venue. The roof also features a series of operable panels distributed around the perimeter of the ETFE that can open and close, depending on the climatic conditions to promote airflow in the stadium and a comfortable environment for fans.”

Here is a tour of many of the tech and other features

Let's get it crunk up on: Technology at Super Bowl 56

As Mary J Blige says "Don't need no hateration holleration"

Instead, we will experience a relentless flood of innovative technologies at the Big Game this Sunday. 

The Stadium

“The 3.1 million-square-foot behemoth in Inglewood is a state-of-the-art technological marvel, featuring a 70,000-square-foot video board (dubbed the “Infinity Screen”), lightning-fast Wi-Fi and a massive LED canopy. SoFi Stadium relies solely on digital displays for everything from advertising to concession stand menus; that also comes in handy since the arena has two NFL tenants, the Rams and the Chargers, and can easily rotate their branding according to who’s playing that day.

With a whopping $5.5 billion price tag, the stadium’s top brass has visions that go far beyond the Super Bowl. The facility is also a concert venue that will host the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bad Bunny this year, and it will play a feature role in the 2028 Summer Olympics in L.A.”

Dot.LA

The video tour below provides more of a perspective

The Broadcast

“Few live sports broadcasts compare with the NFL’s season finale when it comes to total cameras and equipment. However, (NBC’s) Gaudelli emphasizes that additional camera angles will be focused on capturing key situational moments rather than adding more cameras for the sake of adding more cameras. So the bulk of the additions for Super Bowl LVI will be goal-line cameras, cameras shooting down the sidelines, and camera shooting down the end-line in the end zone.

NBC will also debut a new graphics package for the game, upping the ante on AR and virtual elements in the broadcast. For the first time, NBC will have virtual graphics available via a Steadicam on the field and also plans to use SoFi Stadium’s Infinity Screen LED halo scoreboard above the field as a graphic display for some of the virtual graphics in the broadcast.”

Sports Video Group

Metaverse, NFTs and more

“VR and AR experiences have been available for the Super Bowl for a few years now, with FOX Sports broadcasting Super Bowl LI Highlights in near real-time in 2017. Five years later, VR and AR have immensely progressed, with the entire game being able to be streamed in VR on apps like Bigscreen. Bigscreen is a VR app designed to let you watch content with friends in the metaverse.

The NFL has also partnered with Meta to allow fans to decorate their online 3D avatars with virtual NFL merchandise. According to officials from Meta, these 3D, customizable avatars show that the metaverse represents VR and AR, but also more familiar digital platforms like your phone and computer. Small changes like a 3D avatar across all platforms could be a key entry point for people stepping into the metaverse.

In another step in modernizing the Super Bowl, the NFL is offering each attendee of Super Bowl LVI a personalized non-fungible token (NFT) ticket that is customized with their seat number. As of now, the Super Bowl NFTs will be considered collectors’ items. The NFL could also use the ticket NFTs for future experiences and activations.”

Tomorrow’s World Today

Machine Learning

Games this season have already been able to take advantage of ML driven recommendations and hopefully the Super Bowl will be close enough to require early and often the Next Gen Stats Decision Guide which “is built on a series of machine-learning models using the Amazon SageMaker platform powering live fourth-down and two-point-conversion decision analytics. For every crucial decision, Next Gen Stats breaks down the numbers in real time. To create a quantitative tool that can aid in live decision support, we first have to break down the driving factors of the decision: win probability (the impact of each decision on the game) and conversion probability (the likelihood of success with each decision).”

The health and security protocols

KN95 masks will be given to spectators at SoFi and the NFL has vaccine card and other requirements

Security will be massive as the video below describes

The Ventilation

The stadium’s passive ventilation and daylighting strategies — both defining features of its indoor/outdoor atmosphere — capitalize on the sun’s position and ocean winds throughout the day, resulting in a series of small microclimates on the site that informed landscape planning.

This may be a challenge with temperatures expected to be in the 80s. While the stadium has natural ventilation with its roof with open sides, the temperature inside will likely be higher in a packed stadium

The Half-time show 

The acoustics, the lighting and fireworks will be electric – here is a preview

The Commercials

Now for the best part of the game. The price for a 30 second spot is nearly $7 million, yet NBC is sold out of inventory. Lots of technology vendors will be represented.

In fact, it is being called the Crypto Bowl, because as at least 5 of those startups will be featured in Super Bowl commercials. But you also have enterprise vendors like Salesforce with this

My early favorite for best commercial from the Game involves robots. Ok, it also involves beer :)

The whole place should be rocking with Mary J 

"Let's get it crunk up on
Have fun up on, up in this dancery...."

 

High-tech in the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony

If you missed the opening ceremony, here are the highlights from NBC

Vogue magazine provides commentary

In keeping with China’s status as a global leader in technological innovation, the opening ceremony made up for its relatively low number of participants with an extraordinary spectacle created by an array of lasers, lights, enormous LED screens, and pyrotechnics. Despite the use of plenty of cutting-edge technology, however, the ceremony’s imagery was largely inspired by the natural world, with the narrative centered around the beginning of spring and featuring recreations of a variety of Chinese flora and fauna, including willow trees and butterflies. The most spectacular moment? The light sticks paraded by dancers that unfolded to create dandelions, before fireworks exploded above to represent the seeds of the flower spreading across the earth.

While director Zhang Yimou may be best known for the kaleidoscopic cinematography, lavish costuming, and eye-popping sets of his wuxia martial-arts epics Hero and House of Flying Daggers, the three-time Oscar-nominated director’s themes of resilience and national pride made him the obvious choice to direct the opening ceremony at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, widely remembered as one of the most dazzling of all time. So it followed that he was enlisted to direct this year’s proceedings too—and he once again realized his distinctive vision with the ravishing visual splendor that has become his signature.

Here is a summary of some of the tech used for the ceremony

Primer to the Beijing Winter Olympics

The New York Times has a nice overview of every event planned from Alpine Skiing to Snowboarding at the Winter Olympics which start this week.

Below is a promotional video from the International Olympics Committee