As we officially end week one of the college football season, I thought I'd take a look back at an article I wrote about the new rules allowing in-helmet radio communication in games. After hundreds of games played over the past weekend, the system seems to be working quite well. In my observation, there was little noticeable difference visible to the casual fan, and -had TV the announcers not mentioned the change- I would hardly have noticed myself.
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Will Howard with ear-hole blocker in helmet
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It seems the only minor issue may be that hearing the speaker in the helmet may be difficult for the Quarterback during offensive possessions, as they would often pause for seconds at a time cupping their hands over the helmets' ear-holes to better hear the audio. But crowd noise has always played a factor, and a Quarterback being unable to interpret the call from the sideline amidst the noise has been a part of the game forever. It's actually one of the more exciting characteristics of the sport; fans can actively impact the game by getting loud and interfering with one team's communication.
Interestingly, The Ohio State University, who plays in the enormous Ohio Stadium, seating 100,000-plus noisy fans, may have already planned for this. Their Quarterback, Will Howard, had a helmet which appeared to have an apparatus on the ear-hole to block the noise. I did not notice any other teams using such a device, and I'll be curious to see if more begin to appear in week two. Or, if ear-hole cover designs for The Riddel SpeedFlex or Schutt F7 helmets start popping up on 3D printing websites? Maybe I should buy a football helmet to craft one of my own for The Fabrication Lab.
A few final things I noticed were that the hand signals and signs were still very much a factor, though likely not as noticeable to the spectator. NCAA rules currently cut-off in-helmet communication in the final 15 sections of the play clock. Additionally, with only one player selected to wear the radio helmet, other players would no-doubt still benefit from visual cues. So, as I predicted, any advantage or disadvantage brought fourth by the new rules, are very much determined by the humans playing and coaching the games (for now), and not the technology itself. The more talented (and better-prepared) teams take advantage of the new rules, while the rest fall short. So, in many ways, very little has changed.
If you're interested, please give my old article on in-helmet communication in college football below a read, as well as Katie Lindendoll's intriguing article on ESPN.com, which provides a lot of critical and well-researched info on the subject...
Spurious Signals: Technology, Espionage and Football
For anyone who's never paid close attention to a college football sideline, it may look like a troupe of prop comics
dancing all at once. The signs, props and posters are all part of a
complex coding system intended to relay plays and strategies to the
players on the field without tipping off the opponents. But beginning in
Autumn of 2024, things will look much different. Prompted by a
high-profile scandal involving sign-stealing, the National Collegiate
Athletics Association (NCAA) will adopt in-helmet radio communications between coaches and players.
With a presumably
private line of communication between player and coach, there will no
longer need to be a system of audible and visual queues to coordinate
strategies on the field. Or will there? Will radio communication end sign-stealing, and even the playing field? Or, will it complicate things even more?
In-helmet
coach to player radio transmissions are common place in professional
football already, and so far the results appear to be good. The National
Football League (NFL) allows one player on offense (typically the
quarterback) and one player on defense to hear play calls and advice
from the sideline via a small radio in their helmet. Now, college
football, often bound by history and sense of old-school tradition, has
finally followed suit.
As
both an amateur radio operator and avid football fan, I was immediately
curious about how these radio communications would be protected. How
sophisticated are these radios? Is a sports team or league well-enough
prepared to offer fully encrypted end-to-end communication without the
possibility of transmissions being intercepted or blocked by bad actors?
That may sound paranoid, but when you consider that the NFL is a
close-to 20 billion dollar per-year industry, and that collegiate sports
generate hundreds of millions for universities, conferences, coaches
and now the players themselves,
the financial pressure to cheat must be at an all-time high.
Additionally, with recent legalization of online sports gambling, third
parties now have another way to potentially cash-in on illicit
activities involving sports. Could radio waves be a way to hack the
system?
I,
as an inexperienced amateur radio operator, can surreptitiously listen
in on a lot of seemingly private radio conversations. With a scanner, I
can pick up police, public works, commercial and aviation communications
very easily. The Uniden BC125AT scanner,
which retails at about $105 (USD) not only scans through all available
radio frequencies stopping on any "hits" or active/open conversations,
it also scans for and prioritizes privacy tone, or DCS/CTCCS,
protected calls as well as "Close Call" hits that originate within a
certain distance. With the Uniden, I can hear air traffic control,
police, emergency services, commercial, GMRS, MURS
and family walkie-talkie communications within reception distance. This
would include business, event and organization, security, parking and
other radio-to-radio communications. When programmed correctly, I don't
even need to know there's a conversation happening, the scanner simply
searches all frequencies and stops when it gets a hit.
If
I take my Uniden to the airport, I can hear the gate attendant talk
with the baggage crew on the runway, the pilots or airport security
-assuming they are using a commercially radio or walkie-talkie. If I go
to a NASCAR or Formula 1 car race, I can hear the drivers talk to their
mechanics during the race. With a strong enough antenna (but still small
enough to fold and carry in a small bag), I can even hear the
astronauts on the International Space Station. So, I thought,
what type of radio systems are these football teams going to be using to
relay schemes and strategies with the potential to win or lose a game?
If, I, an inexperienced amateur, can eavesdrop on police
transmissions and air traffic, what protections are in place to stop an
advanced user with better equipment from accessing a team's private
channel?
Thankfully, if the NCAA adopts the same security protocols as the NFL next season, players and fans can be relatively confident that no such spy-craft will be happening. A 2012 article by Katie Lindendoll
on ESPN.com explains it better than I can. According to Lindendoll's
article, and Dan Viglione, former employee of the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC), the NFL's system is quite sophisticated. It involves
encryption (which is illegal for amateur use), and both teams'
communications are monitored by the league office. Unlike a standard
walkie-walkie or GMRS radio, where transmission occurs directly from one
user's radio to others, the NFL helmet radios transmit audibly, only
to a central hub somewhere in the stadium and then connect the audio to
a press box or the sideline. The transmission is digitally encrypted,
so even if a person managed to find which frequencies were carrying the
message -which is illegal, if done intentionally- all they would hear is
fuzz, if anything at all.
The
same happens when a coach in the press box or on the sideline talks
back to the player wearing the helmet. During this process, the league
monitors for any abnormalities such as jamming or spurious interference,
which while possible, would likely block both teams radios, as well as
other phones and devices in the area. If such a thing were to happen,
officials could stop the game, and locate the culprit.
Essentially,
the helmet communications are a slightly more sophisticated version of
your cellular or WiFi network. Your phone calls and texts don't go
directly to the recipient, they go to an antenna somewhere nearby,
forwarded to the intended recipient, and get decoded on the listener's
end. And, it is very illegal to look for or attempt to decipher
messages on the cellular bands. In this way, your cell provider acts
like a hardwired switching board protecting your call each step of the
way. (It's why you can be sure I'm not listening in on your private
cellphone calls). Your WiFi network works like a mini cell service in
your own home with the router acting as the switchboard. If you have
your network set-up properly using WPA-type encryption and a strong
password (that you don't give away readily!), the data in your home
should be just as safe.
The
key factor here is less about the technology and more about the
common-sense physical steps we as people take to protect our privacy. A
well-secured network is only as good as the password it uses, and how
well we protect that password. If our WiFi access info is written on a
Post-it note, and someone else sees it, it's not the technology that
failed, but the person who put the code out there for any passersby to
see. Can we be sure that the staff members working for both the teams
and the league are taking the appropriate steps to secure access to
helmet radio communications? Who outside of the teams and officials
could have the access info, or simply be present while a coach messages a
player?
From
instant replay in football to the shot clock in basketball, just about
every sport has adopted some sort of technology on the field of play.
Whether it's for officiating or strategizing, teams and officials have
slowly but surely adopted technologies invented for commerce, science
and governing for the purpose of competition. While sports tend to lag
behind broader society in adopting technology, the possibility to gain
an unfair or illegal advantage, or to cheat, has always been
present. It's no surprise, then, that as technology in sport grows so to
do the vectors from which bad actors can game the system, including
electronic communications.
College football seems to be the latest battlefield in the fight to keep playing field equal for all teams. A high-profile cheating scandal
involving this past year's national champion, and nationally popular
football powerhouse, The University of Michigan Wolverines, erupted in
the mid-2023 season. A paid member of the Michigan coaching staff was
caught at multiple opponents' games filming the teams' sidelines, in an
apparent attempt to record and break future opponents' vocal and visual
signal codes. After the revelation, many of Michigan's opponents
expressed that they had long held suspicions that something was afoot,
that somehow Michigan knew what plays their competitors intended to run
in advance. If this all sounds a bit too outlandish, like something out
of a Cold War spy novel, you clearly have a lot to learn about college
football in the United States. It is that crazy.
The
Michigan scandal is still being investigated by both the Big Ten
conference and the NCAA, and the result remains to be seen. Furthermore,
sign-stealing and code breaking have been common place in both
professional and amateur football since the invention of the sport
itself. It's actually not against the rules to try and de-code a signal
system during the game itself. What Michigan is accused of is traveling
to future opponents' facilities and filming games where they are
not involved, which is illegal. Still the NCAA regulations themselves
allow for a considerable "grey area," where the line between breaking
and bending the rules is often thin.
Will
radio communication lead to a more well-defined rule book, and put an
end to this sort of rule-bending, or will it further complicate ethics
surrounding the sport. Worse, could it lead to methods of cheating so
clandestine and advanced that they go unnoticed by both fans and
officials? Only time will tell, but until the results are clear, lets
hope the only interceptions happening in football are those involving
throwing and catching the pigskin.
Lindendoll, Katie, “Are NFL teams hacking helmet headsets,” ESPN.com, ESPN, 2012.
