The future of football practice

The future of football practice

The idea that could spark a football revolution first stirred in the fall of 1999, from a chair in Steve Spurrier’s Gainesville office.

Teevens was Florida’s running back coach at the time. After practice one day, he sat down with Spurrier to discuss the team's depth at the position and the way reps should be handled in practice. Then Spurrier said something that would ignite a movement two decades later.

"Get them to game day," his boss told him.

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The idea was simple enough. In fact, Teevens thought it up after watching his son control a toy car with a joystick. He wondered if someone could create a much larger version and strap a tackling bag to the top. He funded a graduate program at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering to see what, if anything, was possible.

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The latest version of the MVP—the third generation—weighs roughly 180 pounds and is capable of running a 40-yard dash in around 4.7 seconds, according to Teevens. They have constructed it to move and feel like a football player.

Pretty interesting tech and I can see where it would really get defenders to focus on tackling technique and skills. The bonus is those big hits are possible much more safely at least in practice. The long game is when they can teach the MVP's to hand off, take a hand off, pass and catch then football could become an actual video game made live action robotics.