BreakAway and the XFL: A Shot of Pure Adrenaline to the Heart
By Steve Gera
We recently launched a partnership with the XFL that will see us co-creating from the ground up with one of the most exciting groups of people I’ve ever been around in sport. That work started last weekend at the first two XFL Showcases in Maryland and Florida, where we put more than 500 players (at all position groups) through our advanced camera system and processed 3.3 TB of biomechanics data.
We could not be more proud of the work we’re doing with Dany Garcia, Dwayne Johnson, and Russ Brandon because we’re literally reinventing the way football players are evaluated and empowered with their information. Last weekend alone we created four new drills that we’ve nicknamed The T-Buck, The Wade, The Big A, and The HW after four of the XFL’s head coaches—Terrell Buckley, Wade Phillips, Anthony Becht and Hines Ward. Coaches and scouts are leaning in and we’re delivering. We couldn’t be happier, and I don’t think we could have found a better league partner to innovate with in this way.
What you’re seeing now is a new way of doing things in lockstep with a league that has always been at the forefront of innovation in football. The XFL is rolling up its sleeves and working with us, allowing us to customize technology and data insights to get the most out of players—and to do the most for players.
It all starts at the top. We had the privilege of meeting Commissioner Dany Garcia this past weekend and she’s a shot of pure adrenaline to the heart. She is the rare business leader in sport who is an athlete, practitioner and investor/owner of the highest order. In the same conversation we were brainstorming ways to empower athletes with their data in the BreakAway app and then talking about glute activation and individualized athlete development—something she can do as well as any S&C. There is no other Commissioner in sport who understands athlete development the way Dany does, and we’re truly blessed to be partnering with her and the entire ownership group of the XFL.
When we first described our biomechanics assessments (Field Labs) to Doug Whaley, Marc Ross, and Scott Harniman at the XFL, they immediately understood its game-changing potential and wanted to incorporate it into the league. We use eight cameras that fire at 240 frames per second, capturing every small detail of athletes’ explosive movements with markerless motion-capture software. We measure RPMs—Real Player Movements or Real Position Movements—that paint a picture of true athleticism and game readiness. Players get their results loaded into the BreakAway mobile athlete app, arming them with baselines about their strengths and areas where they can improve during training.
The seeds for what we’re doing now were planted in 2016, when I first started working with my business partner and BreakAway CEO Dave Anderson. We started dreaming up ways to execute an advanced football combine that uses common coaching drills and cutting-edge technology to bring clarity to a scouting and athlete development process that had confused both us during our time in the NFL. He and I only crossed paths once while I was coaching and he was playing in the league—my Chargers destroyed his Texans, 35-10, in 2007—but we had similar curiosities about the way coaches and scouts describe players.
While not an exhaustive list, they use terms such as “explosion,” “burst,” “get-off,” “twitch,” “change of direction,” and “bend” to describe athletic ability and coach it up. The problem is those words can have slightly different meanings to different people, and they’re all based on the eye test. Those subjective opinions are then paired with numbers from NFL combine events such as the 40-yard dash and three-cone drill, which don’t come close to reflecting game-like situations. And the truth is that different players have different ways of generating burst, so we wanted to find a better, more accurate way to give scouts, coaches, and training staff (and the players themselves) better information that can be turned into action.
We found smart people like Kevin Hisey, Kim Popp and Casey Wiens to join BreakAway and help us take those ideas and turn them into what you’re seeing now: a new way of doing things in lockstep with a league that has always been at the forefront of innovation in football. The XFL is rolling up its sleeves and working with us, allowing us to customize technology and data insights to get the most out of players—and to do the most for players. We’re one weekend of work into this partnership and there’s nothing but open field in front of us.
Question? Comment? Want to chat? Email Steve Gera at steve@breakawaydata.com