UW Football | A new world in film study
It’s one of the oldest clichés in football, uttered by just about every coach, every weekend at every level of the game.
“Got to watch the film first.”
There was a time when that’s exactly what it meant, too. Coaches turning on a projector in a dark room while the reels turned.
But like the rest of modern life, the computer revolution has greatly altered one of college football’s most time-worn traditions.
“At the click of a button you can pretty much find anything you want to know,” says UW quarterback Carl Bonnell, describing the computer system the Huskies use to store and catalog their film. “How often they blitzed, when they blitzed, what formations they blitzed against. It’s definitely an advantage from the old days of sitting in front of a reel-to-reel.”
Washington’s video team operates out of a bigger-than-it-looks office tucked just off Edmundson Pavilion. Video-operations director Bill Wong oversees a staff of three that handles the video for all UW sports. But football takes up the majority of its time.
The team shoots every game and practice straight onto a hard drive connected to a computer. That is then uploaded onto a computer network and edited however so desired. Want every play run this season on third-and-seven? Just click a button.
Coaches have special laptops equipped with sports editing software (the Huskies use XOS Technologies) that organizes the information, with the games and practices available to them almost immediately.
“It’s unbelievable how it’s changed,” said UW defensive line coach Randy Hart, who has been a college coach since 1970. “There is so much more information.”
The Huskies and the rest of the Pac-10 are at the forefront of another revolution, as well.
Used to be that teams would film their games, then box up all their tapes and send them to their next opponent - conference rules have long required teams to share such information. That usually meant a box containing up to 18 tapes.
And that meant a lot of busy Sunday mornings for video-operations people like Wong, who had to hurry to the airport to send a package, and wait for one coming in. Given the dicey weather in locales like Pullman and Eugene and Corvallis, sometimes it took a while for the tapes to come in.
The events of 9-11 made matters worse, because you couldn’t just drop off a package anymore.
“I used to sleep zero hours after a game,” Wong said of the process of organizing the film, packaging it, sending it and waiting for one to come in from an opponent.
But beginning last season, all Pac-10 teams began downloading each of their games into a central server located at UCLA that stores all the information.
Each team has access to it and can tap into it whenever it wants (all password-protected so that the general public can’t get into it). Also downloaded with the film is a copy of the play-by-play as well as depth charts and rosters.
The server is a part of the Internet2 network, a less-congested nonprofit consortium that serves universities.
So gone are the days when the Huskies can’t get a head start developing a game plan for Oregon State because there’s fog in Corvallis.
Washington coach Tyrone Willingham said the new system has made that part of his life “very easy.”
“I’m old enough to remember the days where it was 16 millimeters and that was a pain because that means on Sunday, somebody is driving to make a pickup some place,” Willingham said. “And then you’ve got to check to make sure all the programs are there and all the game-day cards, and you can’t check the film there so you find later maybe there are clips that are cut out. All the gamesmanship, if there was something they didn’t want you to see, so you had to call back. That’s why you have the play-by-play so you can see every play. There were times you’d say, ‘Wait a minute, there’s a play or two missing.’ That’s all part of it.”
Not anymore. The plan is for the server to store every game Pac-10 teams play for up to two years, so if the Huskies want to spend a few days in May studying up on, say, the Ducks, they can look at any of their games the past two seasons.
Several other conferences are going to similar systems, but not all have yet, and when the Huskies play nonconference games, the old ways still sometimes return. Washington closes the season at Hawaii, which is not a part of this kind of system, meaning Wong and his staff might again be making an airport run.
As important as scouring opponent film to make a game plan is looking at your own film to check for tendencies other teams might spot.
Many players spend an hour or so a day watching film on their own, either in the coaches’ office or on laptops in player-meeting rooms at Edmundson Pavilion, something that they usually find is a vast difference from high school.
“I just kind of have a routine,” said UW quarterback Jake Locker. “I watch some games early in the week, get into their blitz stuff early, get familiar with what they like to do, when they like to do it. Then I watch their down and distance in the red zone. It’s important to make sure you cover all the main parts, and if you’ve got extra time you look at some formations and plays.
“It’s a lot easier than it used to be. We just kind of put a tape in and watched it in high school and you didn’t really know what you were looking for. I wasn’t really reading coverages in high school and it wasn’t a big deal. We ran the same play every week, and it worked every week.”
Hart said he thinks technology has “taken a lot of the edge out of coaching. There’s no advantage anymore. In the early ’90s, you felt you could outcoach some people. Anymore, everybody has the same information.”
Hart thinks that’s one reason there is increased parity in the game.
“There are fewer secrets,” he said. “That’s why you’re seeing the game you’re seeing.”
And that the coaches and players can see it again and again and again with unprecedented ease.
Bob Condotta: 206-515-5699 or bcondotta@seattletimes.com