Panthers coach Ron Rivera recently expressed some concerns regarding the NFL’s seemingly inevitable embrace of the full capabilities of the Microsoft Surface tablet, making in-game video available to be scrutinized and dissected.
There’s a separate concern that is making its way through the NFL coaching community. As one league source told PFT on Saturday, with a request of anonymity due to the overall sensitivity of the issue, some coaches also are concerned about the actual harvesting of the video that is used on the tablets -- and the video that possibly isn’t used on the tablets.
The NFL would need to have clear and strict procedures and protocols for how in-game film will be shot, who will be shooting it, what else they will (or won’t) be shooting, and where it all will go. The NFL also would need to have a way to ensure that whoever is operating the camera(s) would adhere to these rules.
Rewind to 2007 and the Spygate affair. The Patriots were caught videotaping opposing defensive coaching signals because an employee was using a camera at a time and place when he shouldn’t have been. If the NFL is going to permit teams to pump in-game video to the tablets, how the video is created, who is creating it, and how that process of creating video will be monitored becomes critical to avoiding a violation of whatever limits the league will apply to this effort to embrace technology and, as a practical matter, to make a $400 million partner as happy as it can possibly be.