Pick Up the Phone, NFL: The Future Is Calling

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• MATTHEW FUTTERMAN

The NFL is hamstrung by outdated technology that amounts to Polaroids and old phones, but new contracts could outfit players and coaches with state-of-the-art technology, Matthew Futterman reports on digits. Photo: Getty Images.

On the sidelines during every game, New York Jets cornerback Donald Strickland performs a trick familiar to any toddler who has ever held a flip book.

Strickland takes the two overhead photos of each play that the National Football League allows players to examine—one taken just before the snap, one just after—and turns the pages really quickly to see how the play developed.

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Tennessee Titans quarterback Matt Hasselbeck

For a league that considers itself the world's most innovative big-time sports operation, Strickland's routine is a symbol of just how retrograde the NFL's "technology" really is. But that may be about to change.

According to three top NFL executives, the league has been meeting with technology and communications companies to brainstorm how to bring the league into the 21st century. Every technological advancement you can imagine is on the table.

Coaches selecting plays from tablet computers. Quarterbacks and defensive captains wired to every player on the field and calling plays without a huddle. Digital video on the sidelines so coaches can review plays instantly. Officials carrying hand-held screens for replays. Computer chips embedded in the ball and in the shoulder pads (or mouth guards) that track every move players make and measure their speed, the impact of their hits, even their rate of fatigue.

"It's an intersection of how do we make the game better, the coach's job easier, and the game a better experience for the fans," said Brian Rolapp, the NFL's chief operating officer for media.

What makes the shifts potentially groundbreaking is that major-league sports are famously technophobic. The NFL outlaws computers and PDAs on the sidelines, in the locker room and in press-box coaching booths within 90 minutes of kickoff.

Major League Baseball prohibits computers and other electronic data gadgets once batting practice starts. According to a spokesman, it doesn't anticipate changing soon.

The National Hockey League doesn't have any prohibitions against tablets or computers, but the gadgets aren't widely used during games. The National Basketball Association began letting coaches use tablets during games last season, but only for presenting statistics, scouting information and archived video. No video of the game in progress is permitted.

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Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco talks on the sideline phone

To any number of NFL coaches, players and executives, the tech bans are head-scratchers. "Football is a beautiful sport, but why stop evolving?" said New York Giants defensive back Corey Webster. "Technology is going to change. The game has got to change with it."

Ray Anderson, the NFL's executive vice president for football operations, said the league now appears out of balance with modern culture. Commissioner Roger Goodell is pushing for innovation, despite resistance from some owners. In the very near future, Anderson said there will likely be tablets on the sidelines that will provide digital video and replace the coaches' laminated play cards.

The same goes for wirelessly connecting all officials. Anderson would consider putting a computer chip in the ball and a laser on the goal line to replace the time-consuming debates and video reviews of scoring. As long as opponents can't intercept the communications, he sees no reason why all players and coaches shouldn't be connected with wireless headsets, eliminating the need for a huddle or the quarterbacks' wristbands with plays listed in tiny print.

"We'd like to have a game that moves with no lulls, with play after play after play," Anderson said.

Of course, not everyone is sold on the need to change, even if a sponsor might pay a king's ransom to insert its product into an NFL game.

John Mara, the Giants co-owner and a member of the league's competition committee (which must recommend any changes to league owners before a vote), said he was "more concerned about the integrity of the game and whether that is going to be a benefit to the game or something that is useless." Mara said the league was plenty compelling when his father took Polaroids from the press box at Yankee Stadium and tossed them down to the sideline in a weighted sock.

But other owners appear more ready to bring the latest tools to NFL. Jets owner Robert "Woody" Johnson, who occasionally rides a scooter around New York, sees no reason why tablets shouldn't replace the high-cost thermal photo printers that produce the photos that players currently study. If airline pilots use tablets for maps, Johnson said, why shouldn't teams use them for game shots and possibly video?

Nor is Johnson opposed to wired helmets—as long as the crowd still has the power to drown out a snap count—or a chip on a player to measure performance. "We're ultimately in the business of providing something entertaining to fans," he said.

Even Mara's head coach, Tom Coughlin—the league's oldest, at age 65—acknowledged the changes appear inevitable. "It is going to affect competition without a doubt, but it's certainly going to make it more convenient," Coughlin said.

Part of the impetus for the changes is the chance for a windfall. The NFL's sponsorship deals with wireless device partner Motorola and information-technology sponsor IBM will expire after this season.

Motorola has been spending about $50 million a year to brand the coaching headsets, one of only two corporate names on NFL sidelines, according to a person familiar with the deal. (PepsiCo's Gatorade is the other.) IBM pays the league $10 million annually, but its services as the information-technology sponsor are far more limited and less visible than what the NFL wants from its next technology partner.

This season, two teams, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Baltimore Ravens, distributed playbooks to their players on team-owned iPads. Others, including the Jets, upload game film onto players' iPads each week. And everyone crunches player and team data daily to better inform their decisions on everything from the draft to whether to blitz Tom Brady on second-and-short in the third quarter when it's windy.

To Brian Billick, the former Baltimore Ravens coach who is now an analyst for Fox and the NFL Network, a technological renaissance is long overdue. Billick is widely credited with moving his former profession out of the hidebound world of overhead projectors and hand-drawn diagrams, which he banned in favor of PowerPoint presentations and plays designed on computers.

Billick wants digital video and tablets everywhere. He wants replay officials to have the power to overrule calls on the field in real time, and he wants every player connected with a wireless headset in his helmet. "We're constantly trying to trying to speed up the game, and that would do it," he said.

Jets defensive coordinator Mike Pettine got onto Billick's staff in 2002 by getting someone to convert some 5,000 play diagrams Billick had stored in an Apple format into a more easily transferrable program. Pettine now tracks nearly every aspect of his coaching life in Microsoft Excel, including the number of times his players run each play in practice.

But then game day arrives, and all of the technologically advanced tools of Pettine's profession go in a drawer. He spends the game in the coaches' booth with assistants, recording plays and personnel changes with pad and pencil, relying only on the TV broadcast—the same one fans watch—to analyze replays.

He'd prefer an iPhone or an iPad to track plays during games, plus several large flat-screen monitors on the sidelines to review video instantly with players. He'd have a chip on every player during games and in practice to track their speed and movements and the impact of the hits they are giving and receiving.

Rolapp, the NFL media executive, said the league is looking at what IBM and others could offer in that regard. One goal is to create an inventory of proprietary data that coaches and players could use during games. The NFL could then sell that to statistics companies and fans, who want every piece of data they can find to improve their fantasy-football teams.

These kinds of technologies are already out there. X2Impact, a Seattle-based startup, has embedded accelerometers into mouth guards and linked them to a transmitter in the chin strap, according to Steve Clayton, editor of the Next at Microsoft blog. The data can then be relayed to coaches on sidelines to help them evaluate how a player is performing, or whether he should be removed after absorbing one too many high-impact hits.

"We've had these sensors in our lives for 20 or 30 years," he said. "But you just don't see them in sports very much."

Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com