The day after Steve Jobs retired as CEO of Apple comes word that his products can change the habits of even some of the most stodgy, tradition-loving, change-hating organizations we have: NFL teams.
If you're a Tampa Bay Buccaneer, head coach Raheem Morris has decided that your great big binder filled with Xerox'd pages is gone. Everyone's getting an iPad 2.
"We give these playbooks out, and by the end of training camp, we collect them so nobody sells them on the Internet," Morris said. "They become game books. If you need a reference to go back, you can pull up a blitz from camp and look at it.
"Then it got to the point where we said, 'Hey, let's put some of the video on there ? from the season. How about practice? How would (Josh) Freeman like to go home and watch practice again? How would 'Free' like to sit there and watch third down from Detroit and Miami so when he comes to work the next morning, he's seeing the tape again and putting it all together?'"
That's what we call evolution. That's embracing technology. If something comes along, and it makes certain tasks easier and more convenient, why not embrace it? It seems like an easy call, but I'm certain it's not a coincidence that it was a young head coach with a young team that was the first to go this route.
Morris went to team owner Malcolm Glazer and asked for 90 iPads, and Glazer immediately agreed. If Marvin Lewis asked the same thing of Mike Brown, Brown would ask him why he needed so many feminine hygiene products and then tell him he was going back to a mimeograph machine.
Another bonus for the iPad? If it gets stolen or lost or ends up flying out the back of a garbage truck, it can be erased remotely.
No comments:
Post a Comment