Youngstown born NFL player could win 3rd Super Bowl ring in a row
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (WKBN)- An NFL offensive lineman could win his third Super Bowl ring in a row on Sunday.
Darian Kinnard could achieve this with two different teams who happen to be competing against each other on Sunday.
Kinnard, 25, is an offensive tackle for the Philadelphia Eagles. He won championship rings with the opposing team this weekend: the Kansas City Chiefs.
Kinnard was born in Youngstown and graduated from Saint Ignatius High School in Cleveland. He then played college football at the University of Kentucky and was selected by the Chiefs with the 145th pick in the fifth round of the 2022 NFL Draft.
Kinnard won a Super Bowl with the Chiefs in 2023. In 2024, he won a championship ring as a member of the Chiefs practice squad.
Kinnard signed with the Eagles last offseason. Will Kinnard win his third ring in a row this weekend? It remains to be seen.
Kinnard hopes to be the first NFL player since Ken Norton Jr. to win Super Bowl championships in three consecutive seasons for two different teams. Norton Jr. won two Super Bowls as a member of the Dallas Cowboys and one with the San Francisco 49ers in the 1990s.
WKBN compiled a list of all the NFL Super Bowl players who were born in the Youngstown, Ohio area.
Chad Krispinky also spoke with Cardinal Mooney graduate and safeties coach Donald D'Alesio for the Chiefs ahead of the highly anticipated game.
The kick-off of Super Bowl LIX between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles is at 6:30 p.m. Sunday, February 9 on Fox Youngstown (WYFX).
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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New York Times
24 minutes ago
- New York Times
One more story from the last of his kind
When it's time for the column, Art Spander squints his right eye hard, seeing what's left to see. It's approaching early evening on a Thursday afternoon of the 2025 U.S. Open, the 183rd major golf tournament of his career. The first? Well, that was 1966. A sidebar for the San Francisco Examiner. But that was a long time ago. Art is thinking about today. Advertisement Maybe something on Brooks Koepka, going for a sixth career major win. 'But that's a long way off.' Maybe Rory McIlroy. 'But he shot 74 and didn't talk today.' Maybe little-known J.J. Spaun, the first-round leader. 'He's interesting.' 'You know, I'm a columnist,' he explains to someone half his age, but still pretty old. 'I'm looking for angles.' So Art Spander, 86, one of the last of his kind, a big name of another era, gets to work. A lifetime of this. Games, tournaments. All of them. Everywhere. In the smallest rink on the biggest day, when a bunch of American boys beat a big red army in the Adirondack Mountains as Al Michaels yelled about miracles. In Cincinnati for Henry Aaron's 714th homer, and in Atlanta five nights later for No. 715. Joe Montana to Dwight Clark. Johnny Miller's 63. Kirk Gibson limping 'round the bases, pumping his arm. ('I thought, oh, those poor Athletics.') The highs and lows of Tiger. Federer in his prime. The fall of OJ. ('Boy, was I wrong about him.') All told, he put pen to pad at over 60 Rose Bowls, over 50 Masters, over 40 Super Bowls, over 30 Finals Fours, nearly 20 World Series and a few Olympic Games. Blinded in the left eye at age 8, thanks to a 'a roundhouse' when roughhousing with some kids, Art saw it all through one good eye. Nowadays, he hardly has that. The topic has been narrowed down — Spaun. 'I know he's played well the last few months,' Art says. 'Boy, he'd be a great story.' So begins another column. This is what's left when all the lines of life are blurred. When what one does becomes who one is. When one can't stop being who one is because one doesn't know who else to be. When one's time on this blue marble turns into living history. And when, under it all, there's the kind of love you write stories about. The cursor is blinking. Art starts talking. Liz Spander starts typing. Eons ago, back when people licked their thumbs and peeled giant pages of broadsheet from right to left, press boxes and media centers were packed with sportswriters from all over, pressing keys and pounding copy. Everyone knew everyone. They sprang up like circus tents. One city, one day. Another, the next. Expense accounts were flush. Columnists were kings. Advertisement Today, a new world. As many people work for the teams and leagues as they do for outlets and institutions. There are social media stars being social and influencers influencing. Video folks. Podcast folks. Gambling folks. Times have changed and these rooms reflect it — a codified world of brands and content and bite-sized news. Then Art walks in. The thump of a cane, an uneasy step forward. He's down to 8-to-10 percent vision in that right eye. Glaucoma. He struggles badly with his balance. Liz guides Art in, holding out one arm and dragging a roller bag with the other. She is a much younger 84. The two married in 1962. Even at a golf tournament, easily the crustiest of media centers, you will find that Art is old. There's a certain disbelief as he arrives. How is he still doing this? Why is he still doing this? Should he still be doing this? 'The first thing I think anytime I see Art is, Liz is a saint,' says John Hopkins, 80, formerly the longtime golf correspondent for The Times, now semi-retired. 'How many wives would do all this for their husband? I've had two who wouldn't do it for me.' It's the job. It's the life. It's who Art is. Liz knows it. Debbie, their older daughter, knows it. Wendy, their younger daughter, knows it. Roger Kahn, the author, once wrote, 'Sports tells anyone who watches intelligently about the time in which we live.' This, down to the marrow, is how Art has encountered the world. The players, the people, the relationships. The games, the questions, the stories. The other writers. The travel. Art has written so much, about so many things, for so long, that it can be difficult to imagine him being young. An anthology of Art's collected writing was printed in 1989 — 36 years ago. Al Michaels wrote the forward. The two met in 1973, when Art got wind that the young Cincinnati Reds broadcaster was coming to San Francisco as the Giants' new play-by-play voice. The two were fast friends. As were their wives. All this time later, Michaels, 80, shrugs when he hears that Art has arrived in Pittsburgh to cover a U.S. Open that he will not actually see. Of course he is. Advertisement 'No one has ever been as romantic about sports as Art,' Michaels says. 'He works. He works hard. He cares. He cares hard. I don't know how, but no matter what, he's never lost that sense of wonder.' Makes you think. How much of that is left out there? 'I try not to talk so much anymore, but I still do,' says Art, after a lifetime being told he talks too much. 'It's just my makeup. I'm paranoid or whatever you call it. But what can I do about that? There are all these things I've seen.' That picture book, the one in Art's mind, it begins in 1960, fresh out of UCLA, a job as a copy boy and chauffeur for United Press International. Then a job at the Santa Monica Evening Outlook ('We called it the Evening Outrage, but anyway …'). It was 1963. A gig covering the L.A. Rams and Dodgers. Roman Gabriel and Sandy Koufax. Big-time stuff. Then the San Francisco Chronicle in 1965. Art found golf. Golf found Art. He covered his first Masters in 1967 ('Gay Brewer won.'), splitting a room at the Alamo Hotel in Augusta with a young writer named Dave Kindred. Then the dream job. Lead sports columnist for the San Francisco Examiner in 1979. Art among the kings. Then a move to the Oakland Tribune in 1996. On the side, a regular column in the Sporting News that made him a national name and dispatches on American sports for the London Daily Telegraph. He was a regular on television and radio in the Bay Area. 'OK, Art,' I say, 'but I asked about your wedding day.' 'Oh, right, sorry. I digressed.' If, on a certain June day in 1962, you were driving up the 101 along the California coast and happened to see the two happiest faces there's ever been, that was Art and Liz Spander. The honeymoon was in Vancouver. They stopped at the Seattle World's Fair on the way. They've been traveling ever since. Golf tournaments. Super Bowls. Final Fours. Who could've ever imagined? Advertisement Debbie was firstborn Then came Wendy. Immediately, they were along for the ride. The girls swam in Palm Springs swimming pools with Jack Nicklaus' kids. They played with Rick Barry's fleet of sons on the court at Oakland Arena. They curled up in sleeping bags in the nook under the stairs of a crowded house of sportswriters covering the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. 'It was all very normal,' Wendy says. Only later did the girls come to realize Reggie Jackson didn't sit at other families' dinner tables. Their dad was larger than life, and their world was subscribed to his schedule. 'He was gone a lot, but the things he exposed us to were amazing,' Debbie says. As it goes when one gets older, Wendy and Debbie grew up to understand that while, yes, it was dad who everyone fawned over, it was their mother who made the movie work. Liz taught Spanish at the girls' elementary school. She dropped them at practices and sat in the stands for games. She paid the bills and handled the books. She joined a travel agency in 1973 and began a career that would, in time, support Art's adventures. She started a women's travel group to go to places her husband had no interest. Passport stamps from India, China, Vietnam, Myanmar, Israel, Morocco and Bhutan. Products of their generation. Art gave everything he had to the job because there was someone else giving theirs to everything else. Liz did what she needed to do. 'She kept the house running, worked full-time and basically raised us,' Wendy says. 'I think, maybe in third grade or so, my dad tried to coach a softball team at my school. It was a disaster. All these girls running in all different directions. He was like, well, I'm never doing this again.' She laughs a good laugh. 'That's just the way it was,' Wendy says. 'It still is. She did everything and still does everything.' Advertisement Even the writing. Art can make out some giant-sized words, and sort of make out what's happening on the leaderboard, but he can't make much sense of what's in front of him, hasn't for most of the last year or two. His vision is fading like a ship in the fog. He gets frustrated, embarrassed, upset. But Liz is here, beside him, both at home on the road, with her fingers on the keys. These columns are posted to Art's personal website. Not a lot of places out there for an 86-year-old to be published nowadays, ya know? Sure, there aren't many readers. But that's not why they do it. In a world of clickable headlines and ragebait, everything about Art's work, and his world, amounts to a continuation of his time. He has every Sports Illustrated ever printed and stacks upon stacks upon stacks of newspapers in his basement. In his mind, the writer is history's curator and cynicism doesn't pass for wisdom. He doesn't know any other way. 'This,' Liz says, 'is his identity.' So Art dictates. Liz types. 'Slow down,' she says. 'Sorry, sorry,' Art replies. Another column filed. Art used to theorize with the Washington Post's Chuck Culpepper that hopscotching from sporting event to sporting event can be some kind of secret tonic. 'That there's something about being with the youth,' says Culpepper, 63, 'that keeps you young.' Another theory: Maybe it's more than that. Maybe it's the sense of place. And the story yet to be told. And the adventures, and characters, and relationships. Maybe it's doing the one weird thing you were meant to do. Maybe it's the journey. Art was one of the first writers to travel with a computer. The Teleram P-1800. An enormous thing weighing nearly 20 pounds and resembling a blue suitcase. He would ship it from one game to another or put it on a luggage rack and pull it through the airport. Advertisement That was back in the late '70s, into the '80s. Art began his career by 'stupidly' trying to write like Jim Murray, the LA Times demigod. He later found his voice and wrote the kind of columns that winked at you. He wrote of 'the calculated gamble that passes for Al Davis's life.' He interviewed a 72-year-old Joe DiMaggio at a funeral home an hour before Joe was to serve as a pallbearer in a friend's funeral. He played the first golf course to open in China since it fell under communist rule in 1949. He wrote about a thoroughbred named Cassaleria that was also blind in one eye. They had a lot in common. 'We spend more time drifting right than Ronald Reagan.' Everywhere Art went, his files went. A stack of papers, anywhere from 1-to-2 feet high. It's what everyone remembers the most from those days. Not because the clips were meticulously sorted, but because they were open to all. Culpepper, as a Lexington Herald-Leader columnist in 1998, asked Art about Cal-Stanford and 'The band is on the field!' Art, of course, was there that day, but he had more than memories. He handed Chuck a stack of clips from a game played 16 years earlier. 'I think I realized then just how big his heart is,' Culpepper says. The stories of Art's accumulation of information go on and on. Kindred, maybe the best sportswriter of that generation, says he was 'the internet before the internet.' Even on deadline, he'd pull out a file for a fellow writer. 'I don't think it ever registered with Art that we were competitors,' says Scott Ostler, 77, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle since 1991. 'He didn't give a s— about beating anybody else or scooping people. He just wanted to write what he wanted to write.' Today, Art's computer is a dusty ThinkPad with a smudged screen; marks made pointing at what he wants to read. From that first computer to this one, there's a story of a gift few ever find. Unending curiosity. Art says he wishes he were 30 years younger, so he could see how the stories of today shape tomorrow. He talks about the stories he'd write, wiggling his fingers, pressing down keys that aren't there. How is he still doing this? Why is he still doing this? 'When he grew up, he wanted to be who he became,' says Kindred, 84, 'When you've done that, you want to hold onto it.' It's late in the week at Oakmont and Art Spander is over at his desk, mulling what to write. Liz is over here chatting, thinking about the future. Let it be known, we should all be so fortunate to have seen and done what Art and Liz have seen and done. No one, though, should ever have to decide between who they are and what they're able to do. Advertisement Wendy and Debbie talk about this often. It's unfair to Mom to ferry Dad from place to place. The physical toll. Seriously, what happens if something goes wrong? Art nearly took a spill down the stairs in the Augusta National press building two Aprils ago, but was caught by another writer before hitting the steps. He wisely opted not to tell the family about that. 'It's really demanding on her,' Wendy says of her mom. 'It's hard as a daughter to see.' But what about Dad? Is it fair to be held back from his second home, from all the names he knows, from the place he's most himself? Memories of the pandemic shutdown aren't too far in the distance. 'I remember seeing him wilt,' Debbie says. 'He didn't know what to do.' The girls hoped he would finally sit down and write a book, but that never happened. At this point, even if he could, he'd never do so about himself. Liz says he was always oblivious, or embarrassed, of his fame. There's no right answer, but there is an obvious reality. This year's U.S. Open? This is probably it. The final major event he will cover. 'The last one,' Liz says, tapping fingernails atop a table. 'He knows that, I think. His eye really seems to have gotten worse. Even just this week. Glaucoma is just taking over. It's a shame. He loves to read. He loves to write. He can't do either.' At least he's done so much already. Both daughters? They embarked on careers in sports. Debbie is a big-time agent representing players and high-profile media types. After graduating from Stanford, she dabbled in sportswriting before going to law school. Wendy worked for years at EA Sports, handling PR for the 'Madden' football empire and the 'Tiger Woods PGA Tour' series before moving to a tech communications job. As a student at Penn, she wrote for the school paper and penned a column on how her dad's career influenced all her decisions. Art was — is — a man of eclectic tastes. A collector of Native American Kachina dolls. The theatre. Shakespeare. Running, so much so that he carried the Olympic torch through San Francisco in the Summer of 1988. Wine, so much so that the Spanders have about 800 bottles in their basement. Advertisement But most of all, there's Liz. And, in all of this, the only story that really matters is still going. 'I'm here and I'm very fortunate,' Art tells me, 'because she allows me to be.' You can see it as they leave. Feeling the ground under him change, Art steadies his cane and takes hold of Liz. He doesn't let go. Pushing one foot forward, he feels the ramp of the media center turn into the grass of the golf course. Art lets out a laugh and offers assurance. 'I got it, I got it.' They stop together, for a moment. 'OK,' Art says, 'I just need to know what's coming next.' (Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; photos: Cliff Hawkins / Getty Images)
New York Times
24 minutes ago
- New York Times
How Jets coaches are reading Justin Fields' mind, while Fields is winning over teammates' hearts
In the early days, cameras would track his every move on the practice fields. Reporters were flying in from all over the country to watch him throw passes in shorts. Parking at the facility was impossible, and cameramen mostly overtook the Jets' small press conference room. Florham Park, N.J., tucked 30 miles away (or, over an hour of travel time in traffic) from New York City, turned into a travel destination for national NFL media. It got busiest when HBO's 'Hard Knocks' cameras followed the team around during their 2023 training camp — though they mostly followed Aaron Rodgers. Advertisement The Rodgers Circus has since left town, moving 350 miles away to Pittsburgh. In his wake, Florham Park is a lot less crowded. The cameramen are mostly from local outlets. The reporters too. The remaining cameras are still following the quarterback, mostly. The only one tracking his every move is sitting on top of his helmet, a GoPro the Jets have incorporated into their practices to better understand Justin Fields — the how and the why of what he does at the line of scrimmage and as a play progresses. The way Fields operates in between those moments is a lot quieter than what the Jets are used to. That's exactly what Aaron Glenn wants out of his quarterback — and why he was their No. 1 target when they (quickly) decided Rodgers wasn't going to be a fit for their new program. 'He's not trying to be the celebrity quarterback, he's just trying to be himself,' Glenn said, referencing an adage made famous by his mentor Bill Parcells. 'And whatever comes with that, it comes with it. So, he's not trying to impress anybody. He's going out there and he's busting his a– trying to be the best quarterback he can be for this team. Everybody sees that — and I like that.' Expectations are low for the Jets — as low as they've been since the beginning of the Robert Saleh era. This is a team coming off a disastrous 5-12 season full of drama, dysfunction and a quarterback with a proclivity for distraction. Glenn and general manager Darren Mougey gutted the roster in favor of a youth movement. The focus now is on culture, accountability and fundamentals. Any dreams the Jets have of improving in 2025, of getting back on the right track, starts with their quarterback. This new regime is banking on a talented-but-flawed quarterback who was drafted highly, struggled as a passer in Chicago, was traded to Pittsburgh for peanuts then benched with a winning record, and then hit free agency with a lot to prove. The Jets paid him $40 million over two years and are building their offense around his skillset. Their approach this offseason in free agency and the NFL Draft was derived from cultivating the best possible environment around Fields to help him succeed, to get him on a similar track to other highly drafted players who turned things around after being discarded multiple times — Sam Darnold, Baker Mayfield, Geno Smith and the like. The Jets are pulling out all the stops to help Fields. They need this to work. Much of the criticism of Fields as a passer, dating back to his days with the Bears, centers around his accuracy and his processing at the line of scrimmage. Anonymous reports toward the end of his tenure in Chicago painted the picture of a quarterback who would look everywhere at the line of scrimmage but see nothing — his inner-processing was failing him. There were flashes of the talent that made him a first-round pick in 2021, but he completed only 60.3 percent of his passes in Chicago and threw 30 interceptions in 40 games. Advertisement Since the Jets signed Fields, Glenn has repeatedly alluded to the idea that Fields, in his past stops, was not put in an environment that actually let him play quarterback — as in, throwing the ball and making plays with his arm as much as with his legs. It's an important distinction for a player who has been one of the better running quarterbacks the NFL has ever seen. The Jets are going to run the ball a lot, and Fields will be a part of that — but it won't be his primary role. Glenn brought offensive coordinator Tanner Engstrand with him from Detroit, where Engstrand was a crucial part of the creative Lions offense, one of the highest-scoring and most explosive in the NFL. That was an offense built around the efficiency of Jared Goff, surrounding him with explosive and productive weapons — a group that the Jets are trying to replicate, in a way, in New York. The idea: Use Breece Hall and Braelon Allen as a pseudo-Jahmyr Gibbs-David Montgomery duo at running back. The Jets drafted tight end Mason Taylor, offensive tackle Armand Membou and wide receiver Arian Smith, and Glenn couldn't help but compare them to Sam LaPorta, Penei Sewell and Jameson Williams. The Jets signed Josh Reynolds to be the No. 2 wide receiver – he was productive for the Lions over two seasons (2022-23). But the Jets need Fields to complete the puzzle. The No. 1 goal this spring was to get him comfortable with the offense, the schemes, the routes, the progressions — everything he needs to play fast, use his legs and make the right decisions. That's where the GoPro cameras come in. All four of the quarterbacks wore them this spring and it wouldn't be surprising if that continued into training camp. 'It's awesome. I'm just telling you, I can't believe we didn't do this before,' Engstrand said. 'It is unbelievable. We can hear him call the play in the huddle. We can hear him at the line of scrimmage, making his check, whatever it needs, so you can see his eyes, where he's going, and then you can see him go through the progression. You can see everything from his vantage point.' It's the closest the coaching staff can get to actually reading Fields' mind in the moment. Engstrand and Glenn had used them previously in Detroit a couple years ago, and quarterbacks coach Charles London had experience using GoPro cameras as a tool too. They tested it out during rookie minicamp — and loved it. Advertisement After each practice, Engstrand and London are able to sit with Fields and go through each play to see what Fields did, where he was looking, and how and why he made decisions on certain passing plays. It's also been useful in offering a different perspective to show other position groups too, Engstrand said, because they can hear everything including the calls Fields is making. 'It's, what's your pre-snap process?' Engstrand said. 'You break the huddle, what are you looking at? What are we keying? Are we looking in the right areas? What's the concept? If it's a pass play, am I looking in the right spot? There's all sorts of things to talk about with that.' Said Fields: 'It's kind of cool. It's my first time ever doing it, but it's definitely cool, just basically hearing the play call again and kind of just going through making sure you're just doing everything within the process of the play. I like the GoPro a lot.' It's only OTAs and minicamp, where Fields can't be touched and there isn't tackling, but he showed progress throughout the spring. If he was holding onto the ball too long at the start of OTAs, he was making quicker decisions by the end of minicamp. He's thrown dimes, like a 50-yard bomb to Garrett Wilson followed by a throw in the back of the end zone to Reynolds with pinpoint accuracy. But Glenn has been more impressed by some of the throws Fields didn't make, like on the first day of minicamp when he rolled out of the pocket, saw nobody was open and just threw it away rather than forcing it. 'No negative plays,' Glenn said. Fields is putting in the work. 'The biggest takeaway I would say is that this guy is just a workaholic,' Engstrand said. 'He comes in early, he's here late, and he's trying to digest everything and download all the information and do things the right way. He's trying to do things that we're asking, and I think he's really put the next foot forward every day, just trying to stack days, and it's been really good.' The person who is most excited about Fields' arrival had no idea it was even a possibility until it happened. 'A big smile goes on your face,' said Garrett Wilson. Wilson and Fields were teammates at Ohio State but fell out of touch when Fields got to the NFL. From afar, Wilson kept track of one of his favorite quarterbacks. He was bewildered when Fields fell all the way to No. 11 in the 2021 draft. He'd watch film from Fields' Bears days and wonder why receivers weren't making plays when they should have been. By the end of last season, Wilson and Rodgers weren't exactly the best of friends. A relationship that started with promise ended with each taking subtle shots at each other in press conferences. Privately, Rodgers complained about Wilson's tendency to freelance on routes, and there was frustration from Wilson – and others — about how Rodgers was funneling targets to Davante Adams, shying away from running the ball and ignoring Wilson in the red zone. Advertisement Glenn, Fields and anyone in the Jets organization will tell you: That won't happen in 2025. The Jets will run the ball more often this season, maybe more often than any team in the NFL, and Wilson will be getting plenty of targets, in every situation. It helps that Wilson and Fields — who speak every day and often hang out away from the facility — are so close. 'I'll just say that, he trusts me, I trust him, we've got a good communication, we speak to each other well, we know what the other is thinking and that's key,' Wilson said. 'Him being able to say: 'Garrett, I don't want you running like that, that was the wrong route.' Stuff like that in a certain way where he knows I'm not going to take it the wrong way and we're just trying to get the best out of each other. I know what he can do. I still think the world's gotta see it. We all got something to prove on this team.' Added Fields: ''G' has been my guy for a long time now, so I really feel like we haven't skipped a beat.' Fields had won over Wilson before he ever stepped foot in Florham Park. But Fields' approach is winning him fans all over the locker room. His leadership style might not be as obvious or forthcoming as it was with Rodgers, but Wilson pushes back on the idea that Fields is not vocal. 'He's real cool, calm and collected and brings another sense of calm to the offense and just seeing how he works and how diligent he is and how he cares,' Hall said. 'He's trying to build relationships with everybody and how he goes about his business has been fun so far. He's young like us so we talk about a lot of the same stuff, we hang out on the weekends and he's just been cool to be around.' Tight end Jeremy Ruckert, who played with him at Ohio State too, appreciates his calmness. 'Nothing is going to rattle him,' Ruckert said. 'He's built for this team and this area, he wants the pressure. He's built for it. The attitude he brings and the professionalism he has, he's shown it since college. He'll continue to do that and we'll rally around him.' Added safety Tony Adams: 'Guys want to fight for him. Those guys want to go to war for him. He's laid back but you can tell he's confident in himself, confident in his abilities. Advertisement Off the field, Fields has made an effort to spend time with his teammates on both sides of the ball. He went to a golf simulator with offensive linemen and tight ends. He went to a crab boil with teammates one weekend, a get-together at Allen Lazard's place another week and has hung out with linebacker Jamien Sherwood and other defensive players away from the facility too. In this long part of the offseason, he plans on getting some of his offensive weapons together to workout ahead of training camp. 'Guys keep coming up to me saying: Man, that's my guy,' Wilson said. 'He's got a different way about him. It's very commanding in the huddle. Like: Hey, we're messing up. Let's get on that s—. But you get it from the standpoint of, he's not degrading anybody, he's not going to put it a certain way.' Said Glenn: 'Yes, he has a quiet voice, but that quiet voice doesn't mean that people don't hear him. People see the way he works, that speaks more than what you say, and I like that about him because he is himself and he's authentic, and he's not going to change for nobody. I'd rather have that than somebody that's fake.'
New York Times
24 minutes ago
- New York Times
AI is coming to the NFL, and it could transform the game
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick released '2001: A Space Odyssey' and creeped out an entire country with the idea of a future controlled by artificial intelligence. In the summer of 2025, Zac Robinson is facing the idea of watching football and discussing strategy with a computer, and he's a little creeped out, too. Advertisement The 38-year-old Atlanta Falcons offensive coordinator worked as an analyst for Pro Football Focus before starting his coaching career in 2019, a stint that convinced him of the value and potential of advanced analytics. But there's a wide gulf between the math used to optimize fourth-down decisions and a voiced AI agent telling you to look out for the weakside linebacker while you're sitting alone in your office on a Tuesday night. 'I don't know,' Robinson said, considering the scenario. 'I'm a little scared.' He and other NFL coaches are going to have to get comfortable crossing that water soon. Instead of Hal 9000, think of it as the Bill Walsh 3000, which could be assigned to watch the rotations of the secondary while a human coach focuses on the front seven. 'I'd have to see what that looks like,' Robinson said. '(A computer) barking at me, I might get a little frustrated, but if it ends up being a cool tool, that'll be interesting.' Ryan Paganetti got his job in part because of artificial intelligence. He was hired by Las Vegas Raiders head coach Pete Carroll in March as the team's 'Head Coach Research Specialist,' but the job may be better understood as AI coordinator. 'I don't think when I was hired the idea was, 'This is our AI guy,' but there is no doubt whatsoever that I am going to be using AI every single day,' he said. 'And probably in increasingly larger amounts every month that goes by.' In a league in which teams are constantly looking for an edge, the next big one won't be coming through the draft or free agency, Paganetti believes, but from artificial intelligence tools that are on the verge of transforming how coaches think about the game and do their jobs … and maybe even which coaches still have those jobs in a decade. 'It almost might be a blockbuster moment where some coaches, their roles are replaced entirely,' Paganetti said. 'That's an issue in all sorts of industries where AI is just better and more accurate. I think that is going to happen with the football industry, to some degree. Advertisement 'I feel pretty confident saying some team is going to win a Super Bowl in the next few years utilizing AI at a very high rate, significantly higher than it has ever been used before,' he said. 'It's really an opportunity to differentiate yourself from a team that might have a more talented roster or better coaches or whatnot. There is going to be more and more separation with teams that are bought in.' Carroll is fully bought in. The NFL's oldest head coach is maybe its biggest believer in its youngest technology. 'Everything you can think of is possible right now,' the 73-year-old said. His early adopter status isn't surprising considering his history, which includes head coaching stints with the New York Jets, New England Patriots, Seattle Seahawks and at the University of Southern California, where last year he taught a class called 'The Game of Life.' As part of that class, Carroll spoke with author and new-age guru Deepak Chopra. 'Check this out,' Carroll said, 'he talked about AI giving him the opportunity to interview himself, talking to himself through AI so he was actually questioning his own person and being answered by his own person in return. Some of it does feel like science fiction, I get that, but AI is around the corner for us.' Nearly three decades ago, IBM began developing the supercomputer Deep Blue to face off against world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Kasparov won his first match against the machine in 1996, but Deep Blue won the rematch the next year, and humans haven't provided a chess challenge to computers since. Computers have since mastered the ancient Chinese board game Go, which involves exponentially more possible moves than chess. Football presents a much tougher computer problem than chess or Go for myriad reasons, but many experts agree that some of the analytical functions done by human coaches could be done better, or at least more efficiently, by artificial intelligence, and the current rate of improvement in the industry suggests that moment might not be far away. While the world ponders a future where computers can generate their own decisions, the technology still is almost entirely machine learning and brute computing power rather than human-like intelligence. 'Think of machine learning as a technique for achieving artificial intelligence,' said John Guttag, the Dugald C. Jackson Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT. Advertisement The large language models that power most AI and machine learning 'don't know how to watch football yet, but I think with some work, they can be taught to watch football,' said Udit Ranasaria, a senior researcher at SumerSports, one of a handful of companies developing artificial intelligence tools with the potential to reshape professional football. 'We can get to a place where we have something like ChatGPT that understands what's happening in the NFL.' It probably won't take long, said Guttag, who leads the school's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Data Driven Inference Group and has co-presented several papers about the uses of machine learning in the NBA and Major League Baseball. In 2020, he was the thesis supervisor for a 55-page dissertation written by Udgam Goyal titled 'Leveraging Machine Learning to Predict Playcalling Tendencies in the NFL.' 'A big branch of artificial intelligence from almost the beginning has been computer vision, trying to get computers to see things and figure out what is in the image,' Guttag said. But football is a more complex problem for computer vision than basketball, baseball or soccer because of the proximity of players to the line of scrimmage and the variance in personnel. 'Fourth-and-1 with Mike Vick and Alge Crumpler looks a lot different than fourth-and-1 with Kirk Cousins and Kyle Pitts,' said Omar Ajmeri, the CEO and co-founder of Slants, which uses machine learning to pull scouting information from football film. Current artificial intelligence is capable of 'watching' game film from two teams, formulating a game plan and printing out call sheets for offensive and defensive coordinators, said Vishakh Sandwar, one half of the winning team at this year's Big Data Bowl, which is sponsored by the NFL. 'It's just a matter of the quality at this point,' he said. Sandwar and fellow NYU alum Smit Bajaj's winning project created an algorithm that can identify coverages based on the computer's 'visual' analysis of defenders. The model, which used technology developed by Sumer, achieved an accuracy level of 89 percent based only on pre-snap alignments. It adjusts in real time as defensive players move and can identify which are the worst offenders in giving away coverages before the snap. It also allows coaches to create custom looks by moving defenders on a digital whiteboard. Artificial intelligence 'is very good at piecing together relationships in very, very high-dimensional spaces,' Bajaj said. 'With languages, it's able to piece together and understand that based on the entire history of the internet, this is the word that is likely to come next. It's increasingly being used, I would assume, in NFL buildings to piece together player-to-player relationships as well.' Advertisement 'Over time, it will get better and better,' Guttag said. 'And what you'll do is say, 'Here are all the series that led to first downs. Here are all the series that didn't lead to first downs. What are the important differences?' — without hypothesizing before. You'll just let the AI machine learning look at all that data and say, 'Here are some interesting differences.' One of the great things about machine learning is it finds things you didn't know were there.' Bajaj spoke to The Athletic for this article in March. By May, he had been hired by the Philadelphia Eagles (Sandwar was hired by Sumer this spring). Before joining the Eagles, Bajaj was interning in the Philadelphia Phillies' analytics department, which has more than 35 employees. In the NFL, only three teams have more than six employees in their departments, according to research by ESPN's Seth Walder. Fourteen have three or fewer, and none have more than the Cleveland Browns' 10. 'I do know there are opportunities, but it requires a real commitment,' Guttag said. 'If you're going to do this, it's going to take premier talent. We're not going to be able to take an ex-player and say, 'Go run this department.' You look at what Google pays their top machine-learning people. It's not NFL player salaries, but it's not NFL office salaries, either.' After Ajmeri presented at MIT's Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2018, he was asked to meet with NFL teams in 'really far corners of the conference center,' even across the street at a Starbucks. The upcoming arms race in artificial intelligence hiring will stay in the shadows, predicted Paganetti, who declined to discuss any specifics about how the Raiders will use the upcoming advancements. An artificial intelligence agent could assist in play calling during games, but NFL rules ban that sort of assistance from kickoff until the clock hits zero. During the week, everything in the AI realm is in bounds, although the league continues to monitor developments, at least the ones it knows about. 'There's still an extreme level of secrecy,' Paganetti said. 'Even people who work in analytics have very little idea what people working in analytics for other teams do sometimes because it's considered company secrets. We know what the scouts do on the other team: They scout. We know what the coaches do on the other teams: They coach. But when it comes to the actual contribution of the analytics department of another team, it's really open-ended.' Atlanta passing game coordinator T.J. Yates, like coaches in many buildings in the NFL, already works with Telemetry Sports for computer-generated coaching aids. The son of an engineer and the Falcons' coaching staff's biggest trumpeter of technological possibilities, Yates knows other advancements are looming. Advertisement 'If you're not using it, it's dumb, because it's there for us,' Yates said. 'The days of sitting there grinding until two or three o'clock in the morning, there are way too many available opportunities to cut that out and be efficient and go home and get some sleep and have a sharper mind and have good energy for your players the next day.' SumerSports' technology isn't built to replace coaches, just to make their jobs easier, CEO Lorrissa Horton said: 'Our question is 'How can we help them be more efficient?'' Former Falcons and Patriots executive Thomas Dimitroff is the director of football operations at Sumer and has led the organization's presentations to coaches and executives around the league. 'Everyone is on the edge of their seats during those meetings,' Dimitroff said. 'They are salivating at the idea of 'How can I be able to do this?' Coaches would welcome nothing more than to be able to do these things faster and more effectively than they are doing them now.' The key, he said, will be making sure the technology is easily accessible. 'There are a lot of very, very smart coaches,' he said, 'but oftentimes they don't have the time in their schedule to learn what Lorrissa's group can teach so they get a little antsy with it and say, 'Screw it, I'll get to that later.'' Tennessee Titans head coach Brian Callahan believes artificial intelligence acceptance around the league will vary. 'Anytime you are talking to a football coach who has done one thing for a long time, it takes time for that to take hold, but I do think there is a much more open mind to all of those things: data, analytics, new processes,' the 41-year-old said. 'Yeah, there will be some pushback in some spots, but there are a lot of other spots where guys will look at it as something that can really help.' Advertisement Guttag is less optimistic about buy-in, pointing out the resistance coaches showed to accepting the math behind fourth-down decision-making, maybe the most rudimentary form of machine learning introduced to the game. 'Anyone who knew any math at all knew they were behaving stupidly, and yet they continued to do it,' he said. 'It's kind of remarkable.' The next wave of artificial intelligence will make the fourth-down bot look like an abacus. The NFL already is using an AI application called Digital Athlete to help teams predict injuries, but the upcoming coaching applications are where NFL fans are most likely to see results. 'With things like 'What play should you run against this look? What blitz should you run against this alignment?' — those are areas where AI can really move the needle or come up with ideas that you might otherwise never have thought of,' Paganetti said. This season, the league will implement Sony's Hawk-Eye system to measure first downs with computer vision, which means six 8K cameras will be used in every stadium. If the footage from those cameras is someday fed into AI applications, it could further accelerate the pace of advancements. Dimitroff estimates that 75 percent of NFL teams are using some sort of artificial intelligence in their weekly preparation but that most are using it only at the most basic level. Carroll, at least, plans to be on the cutting edge soon. 'It's just such a wide-open domain to kind of figure things out and do things new, take advantage and utilize everything you can think of,' Carroll said. 'That's something I like, man. If you're not curious, you're not growing. The last thing I'm going to do is ignore AI.' (Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photo: Scott Winters / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
