Technology helping CU Buffs prepare for football season – The Fort Morgan Times


Technology helping CU Buffs prepare for football season – The Fort Morgan Times

For the nearly five months, the Colorado football team has operated mainly on Zoom.

In many ways, CU and new head coach Karl Dorrell have made the most of that technology. But, Dorrell wanted to take another step in preparing the Buffs for football games – if they are to happen this fall.

While the fate of the upcoming season remains in doubt because of the coronavirus pandemic, CU recently introduced a new video program to test players’ recognition of formations, motion and adjustments.

“Our players, they are young players, young kids that  in their spare time they’re either on Xbox games … or PlayStation games,” Dorrell said during a CU webinar earlier this week. “We decided that there was a product out there that could test our student athletes on football-related information from a game perspective.”

Dorrell said the team has done “everything that we’ve asked them to do” through Zoom meetings, but this new program has allowed the Buffs to test their knowledge.

“We had a tremendous run of just doing normal Zoom meetings,” Dorrell said. “Now we wanted this interactive part. It does measure their time element in terms of their answers. It will tell them right away whether they got the answer wrong or right.”

The program is position-specific and will test the players on various aspects pertaining to their position.

During the test, a play from a CU game will be shown with a question, such as, “What motion is this?” or “What play is this?” or “What type of offensive formation is this?” The player is given four options and a certain amount of time to click on an answer.

“He’ll get to a countdown that starts and he’ll see the information,” Dorrell said. “Then he has to make a quick assessment.

“We’re trying to get our players to put themselves in the game, so that they can understand their job, their role. We do this by position, so the quarterbacks have a series of information that they’re looking at, just like the offensive line would, the defensive line, the linebackers. So, it’s all position specific, but it’s asking them pertinent information about things that they should know, and should be able to spit and recall as quickly as they can. We’re trying to test how fast they can give us the information and their accuracy in doing that.”

The coaches are then able to log in to see which players have used the program, how often and the scores they are producing. Although it is new technology with some kinks to be worked out, Dorrell said, “The players love it. They take a great deal of pride of getting it done correctly so that at the very last time they do the rep, they’re 100 percent, so it’s a good teaching tool.”

At this point, CU has not announced its preseason camp schedule, although Pac-12 teams are allowed to start practice on Aug. 17. The Zoom meetings and this latest technology have helped to keep the team engaged and mentally sharp, but the team hasn’t done anything together on a football field since leaving Utah’s Rice-Eccles Stadium on Nov. 30.

“We feel, as coaches and as players, there might be a little bit of a rust, a little bit of a transition of getting back into it from a conditioning standpoint, but we feel that that transition and that rust will just quickly eliminate as we get going,” Dorrell said.

Dorrell’s hope is that preseason camp will be more about applying w hat’s learned to the field, rather than spending time learning the mental side of the game.

“The whole goal for us in camp is that our players have done such a tremendous job with knowing the information on offense and on defense and special teams, is that now that we’re in the process of doing walkthroughs and going on the field, it’s now just a matter of tuning it out and knocking the rust off, instead of really learning,” he said. “We feel we’re in pretty good shape from that standpoint. We have between now and our first game on Sept. 26 when we play Oregon that we’re going to be really ready to go and fight and do a great job of having a great year.”

CU is scheduled to open its season Sept. 26 at Oregon, with Utah scheduled to visit CU on Oct. 3 in the home opener at Folsom Field.


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