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Dear NFL: We Want On-Field Tweets, Not Just Sideline Stuff! C’mon, Man!

January 25, 2012 by

The game that nobody watches, aka this weekend’s NFL Pro Bowl, is all of a sudden more compelling because — in the No Fun League — players will be allowed to use Twitter during the game, for those random on-field thoughts that us fans just can’t do without.

In typical NFL fashion (see: instant replay) however the apparent way-cool thing is gummed up with controls — players won’t be able to use their mobile device of choice, but will instead be forced to use sideline computers to send their tweets out to the tweetosphere. Putting aside the obvious misstep and head-scratching decision to usurp potential mobile device sponsors (“Ray Lewis here on the Motorola Droid RAZR, LOL!”) the bigger question is if you are going to allow Twitter during games, why not go all the way?

Get coach Ditka on the line for a big C’MON MAN! Commish Rog, here’s the message: WANT LIVE TWEETS! Tweets from the bottom of the pile. Tweets during the snap count. (“One thousand one, Aaron Rodgers! Double-check this blitz!”) Tweets during the play (any wide receiver: “IM OPEN MOFOA!!!”) If anything the league should go completely in the other direction and REQUIRE all players to be using mobile devices at all times, while on the field of play. That would introduce a degree of difficulty that might make the Pro Bowl entertaining, instead of the flag football snoozefest it regularly becomes.

The possibility for new rules are endless… you have to send a tweet while the punt is in the air before you can catch it… if you want to blitz the entire D-line or the blitzing player has to send a DM to the quarterback before the ball is snapped… but instead we have the sanitized, red flag for coaches thinking from the NFL. (And get real: these guys are going to SHARE a computer? Riiiight.) Here’s the money quote on this “innovative” twist:

“This is an innovative way to further engage our fans who have an insatiable appetite for football,” league spokesman Brian McCarthy said. “NFL players have been very active on social media and enjoying talking to fans. The nature of the Pro Bowl enables us to have players tweet during the game.”

If we get some uncensored sideline emotion (like Tom Brady’s outburst earlier this year) then maybe the experiment will be worthwhile. But our guess is that the “sideline tweets” will be as useless as the Pro Bowl itself. #bringbackthecollegeallstars.

Filed Under: NFL, Twitter Tagged With: ,

Super Cellular Battle II: AT&T, T-Mobile Beef Up Indy Coverage; But What About Twitter?

January 24, 2012 by

If your call, text or tweet doesn’t get through from the Super Bowl in Indianapolis, you probably won’t be able to blame the phone companies. Today AT&T and T-Mobile joined Verizon Wireless and Sprint in announcing special plans to increase wireless capacity for the Feb. 5 showdown between New England and New York, which is expected to attract enough folks to completely fill the 70,000-seat Lucas Oil Stadium.

From the info provided so far it looks like AT&T has done the most in terms of bringing wireless resources to the Indy table: According to the press release AT&T is not only expanding the DAS antenna coverage inside the arena, it is also firing up a public Wi-Fi hot zone in the adjacent neighborhood, while also adding some outside DAS deployments as well as driving nine COWs (cell towers on wheels) in for the party. Indy is also one of the select cities where AT&T has launched its new 4G LTE network, so it’s a good guess that the infrastructure there is new and ready to rock. Safe to say, AT&T probably isn’t going to experience a SXSW style cellular fail at the Super Bowl this year.

T-Mobile, the nation’s fourth largest wireless provider, had sort of a me-too feel to its announcement but things like free charging stations (at the T-Mobile store that is near the stadium) and a T-Mobile sponsored relaxation zone with couches and hot beverages might come in handy if you are in the area. T-Mobile says it has also beefed up backhaul inside the stadium and throughout Indianapolis in general, so if you are a T-Mobile customer you should be OK come game day.

Still unanswered is the question of whether or not popular Internet sites like Twitter are making similar infrastructure preparations for the expected surge in traffic. We still haven’t seen any explanation or mea culpas from Twitter in regards to Sunday’s multiple fail whale appearances, other than a small status report that says everything got fixed. As Jim Rome says, better head to Fry’s, guys, and beef up that server farm.

Awesome day for the NFL, terrible day for Twitter. Better hit up Fry’s for a server or two before the Super Bowl.

January 22, 2012 10:24 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@jimrome

Jim Rome

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, NFL, Sprint, Super Bowl, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Super Cellular Battle: Verizon Adds DAS, Sprint Calls on the COWs

January 18, 2012 by

Portable cellular tower on light truck -- aka a "COLT." Credit: Verizon Wireless

In addition to the football game, there’s a cellular supremacy battle going on in advance of the NFL’s Super Bowl on Feb. 5, as wireless providers are bringing in extra technology to make sure all their customers’ calls go through on the big day in Indianapolis.

The cellular conundrum facing sporting events is old hat to readers of Mobile Sports Report, who know about the bandwidth challenges when 70,000 of your closest friends show up on Sunday and all try to post to Facebook at the same time. For the Super Bowl in Indy’s Lucas Oil Stadium Verizon Wireless has the inside lead, by installing a Distributed Antenna System (DAS), basically a bunch of small cellular antennas hung inside the building to provide better reception. AT&T put a DAS in the Superdome ahead of the BCS championship, and has put DAS installs in other stadiums like Cowboys Stadium in Dallas.

There’s an excellent walk-through with geek-heavy pictures about the Verizon updates in this post by theGadgets blog, which apparently is local to the Hoosier locale. Verizon is also installing public Wi-Fi networks inside both the stadium and the nearby convention center, and will improve outside coverage by bringing in COWs, aka Cell towers On Wheels — mobile antennas that beef up coverage. Verizon notes that Indianapolis is one of its 4G LTE coverage areas, so customers with access to Verizon’s newer faster network will have 4G access at the game, all the better to watch the mobile stream of the Super Bowl via the NFL Mobile app, only available from Verizon.

Also calling in the COWs is competitor Sprint Nextel, which according to a press release out today will drive in two COWs for the stadium, two at the Super Bowl village and one more at the University of Indianapolis (the NFC practice facility). Sprint also says it has “added capacity to 21 CDMA [3G wireless] sites and seven iDEN [push to talk] sites around downtown and surrounding area hotels, including a major capacity upgrade inside the stadium.”

We are still waiting for an official AT&T response but you can bet Ma Bell will also be beefing up its cellular arsenal in advance of the Feb. 5 game day. All good news for connected fans who want to stay linked while they’re at the big game.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, BCS, NFL, NFL Mobile, Sprint, Super Bowl, Verizon Wireless Tagged With: , , , ,

Sunday Sermon: Dialing Back on Negative Tweets

January 15, 2012 by

It took me all of two weeks to break my New Year’s resolution of “being less negative” and I didn’t even realize that I was doing it — all I was doing was sending out a Tweet, taking an easy pot-shot at the second-tier announcing team from Fox for Saturday’s Niners-Saints game, the crew of Kenny Albert, Tony Siragusa and Daryl Johnston. They were distracting at best, with Johnston in particular talking about some idiotic concussion-phone system while the game was going on and then blowing a replay prediction that was pretty obvious to anyone watching. So I hit send on this:

This announcing team for the Niners-Saints is so bad it makes me wish for Joe Buck and Tim McCarver. OK not really. But they are bad.

January 14, 2012 4:01 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@paulkaps

paulkaps

After I posted it we had a momentary glitch in the Internet stream here at MSR HQ and as such I had to take an involuntary social-media break. That allowed me to look at my impromptu slam and wonder: Where did all the bile come from for guys who were just doing their job? Do I have the right to smack publicly on Tony Siragusa and Daryl Johnston just because they rub me the wrong way? What does that make me, other than JAOJ (just another online jerk)?

I mean, it’s not like the Fox crew was factually incorrect, or slurring their speech, or saying something morally reprehensible. Like many people I just don’t like the ha-ha attitude they take, the whole Moose-and-Goose show tenor of the announcing this crew puts out. But it must test positive for some percentage of viewership, otherwise (you hope) that Fox would find some other talent to replace them. From watching all the commercials during the playoff broadcasts this weekend, there’s apparently a lot on TV that I would never spend a minute watching, like “Glee,” “Two and a Half Men,” and “Alcatraz.” So I am probably not in the mainstream when it comes to offering programming commentary.

And then even if I was, look at that Tweet — if you are going to be critical, you should follow the Jim Rome rule of “have a take, don’t suck.” And that tweet has about a half a take or less. It just says the Fox crew is bad, not saying how or why — and then takes a sideways poke at Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, which is out of context since baseball season ended roughly 26 months ago and if I wanted to make a Joe Buck call it should have somehow involved Troy Aikman, his NFL broadcast partner. And I actually don’t mind Buck as much on NFL as on baseball.

So I would say looking back that my Tweet was the opposite of the Rome rule: It had no take, and it sucked. A good lesson in that negativity is usually the worst choice when it comes to commentary, one I will try to remember when engaged at the keyboard next time. That Twitter makes it easy to slam someone every second isn’t Twitter’s fault. It’s called operator error. And with any luck I’ll be doing it less as the year progresses.

Filed Under: Awful Announcing, Fox Sports, Twitter Tagged With: ,

Tim Tebow A No Show As StatSheet Beats NFL to All-Pro Punch

December 27, 2011 by

StatSheet, the robotic sports news service that provides stories and stats as they happen, jumped ahead of the National Football League today by releasing ranks and grades that show how each player performed on a game-by-game basis.

In its selections, StatSheet demonstrated statistically that Denver Broncos phenom QB Tim Tebow is nowhere near qualified to play in the game in Hawaii.

The complete list of StatSheet selections at the key offensive positions appears at the bottom of this blog post.

The NFL is scheduled to release its All-Pro selections later today.

StatSheet’s All-Pro team was created by Joe Procopio — the StatSheet team member most responsible for promoting StatSheet, and developing its community. The listing is branded by StatSheet as the NFL All-StatSheet Team. Mobile sports fans can expect to see this grow into an annual event, as StatSheet works to become a trusted source for fast and accurate sports information .

StatSheet works differently than ESPN, CBS Sports, Yahoo Sports and most competitors. It draws in-depth information from all available sources of real-time sports information, and assembles it into automated sports stories, drill-down statistics and graphics. Sports is the first subject interested StatSheet’s parent company is tackling, but it is likely to eventually compete or partner in financial services with such companies as Bloomberg.

Here is StatSheet’s 2011 All-Pro team:

Quarterback

AFC
Tom Brady
New England Patriots
100+ points = A+
4,897 yards, 36 TD, 11 INT

Matt Schaub
Houston Texans
90.0 points = A-
2,479 yards, 15 TD, 6 INT

Injury Replacement
Philip Rivers
San Diego Chargers
87.0 points = B+
4,314 yards, 24 TD, 19 INT

NFC
Aaron Rodgers
Green Bay Packers
100+ points = A+
4,643 yards, 45 TD, 6 INT

Drew Brees
New Orleans Saints
100+ points = A+
5,087 yards, 41 TD, 13 INT

Running Back

AFC
Fred Jackson
Buffalo Bills
100+ points = A+
934 yards, 6 TD

Maurice Jones-Drew
Jacksonville Jaguars
100+ points = A+
1,437 yards, 8 TD

Injury Replacement
Arian Foster
Houston Texans
100+ points = A+
1224 yards, 10 TD

NFC

LeSean McCoy
Philadelphia Eagles
100+ points = A+
1,309 yards, 17 TD

Matt Forte
Chicago Bears
94.1+ points = A
997 yards, 3 TD

Injury Replacement
Skipping over Jahvid Best, Detroit Lions, 94.1/A and Adrian Peterson, Minnesota Vikings, 91.3/A-
Marshawn Lynch
Seattle Seahawks
91.1 points = A-
1,118 yards, 12 TD

Wide Receiver

AFC
Wes Welker
New England Patriots
100+ points = A+
1,518 yards, 9 TD

Mike Wallace
Pittsburgh Steelers
94.9 points = A
1,182 yards, 8 TD

NFC
Calvin Johnson
Detroit Lions
100+ points = A+
1,437 yards, 15 TD

Victor Cruz
New York Giants
97.1+ points = A+
1,358 yards, 8 TD

Tight End

AFC
Rob Gronkowski
New England Patriots
100+ points = A+
1,219 yards, 15 TD

Aaron Hernandez
New England Patriots
99.3 points = A+
772 yards, 6 TD

NFC
Jimmy Graham
New Orleans Saints
100+ points = A+
1,213 yards, 10 TD

Tony Gonzalez
Atlanta Falcons
97.6 points = A+
867 yards, 7 TD

Filed Under: NFL Tagged With: ,

NFL: Thursday Night Games Average 450,000 Online Viewers

December 26, 2011 by

In case you were still wondering whether or not online access hurts regular-television audience numbers, here’s another data point to confirm that it doesn’t: The NFL said Monday that TV views of its Thursday night NFL Network games is up 8 percent over last year, while its online audience is averaging 450,000 unique views per game.

The 450,000 number isn’t broken down between viewers of the streaming coverage at NFLNetwork.com or folks watching via Verizon Wireless’s NFL Mobile app, but either way the aggregate total is impressive, and a signal that there may be even more of an appetite for NFL content than was previously thought.

With the Super Bowl slated for online streaming, it is the guess of MSR that the days of online access being a novelty have ended and now an online outlet will become the norm rather than the exception. How that plays into rights contracts and teams’ marketing campaigns is something still in its infancy, but it will be a compelling story we’ll follow closely in 2012.

Filed Under: iPad, iPhone, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, NFL, NFL Mobile, NFL Network, Super Bowl, Verizon Wireless Tagged With: , , ,
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