Texas football coaches spend hours developing game plans every week. Now they have a new voice available at their meetings: a chatbot. They type questions into their computer and ask an artificial intelligence about tendencies.
How often does an opponent blitz on third-and-5 or shorter? Which receiver do they target on third down? Are they more likely to run or pass on third-and-short?
Google's Gemini sifts through cloud-stored data, examines it, and provides its findings. Soon, it will do much more. Texas on Friday announced a new sports analytics and artificial intelligence hub on campus called the Bevo Lab, a 25,000-square-foot space inside Austin's Innovation Tower.
Google Cloud, Dell Technologies and SHI International are the founding corporate partners for what they believe is the first-of-its-kind hub focused on sports analytics. "It's not the boogeyman," Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte told CBS Sports. Let's lean into analytics." Texas says early work with Google Public Sector has saved its coaches more than 15 hours a week in game preparation this season.
Kirk Goldsberry, executive director of the Business of Sports Institute at Texas, said the figure comes from the Longhorns' game-planning reports. Google engineers helped rebuild how those reports are produced, digging through what Goldsberry called "haystacks of data." "They would come in Saturday night or Sunday morning and have their game planning reports ready for big meetings Sunday and Monday," Goldsberry said. "That was a giant pain in the rear end.
We were able to streamline some of that." Goldsberry made his name charting shots in the NBA for ESPN's Grantland, and later served as the San Antonio Spurs' vice president of strategic research and head analyst for Team USA Basketball. He also wrote the New York Times bestseller "SprawlBall." "The biggest mystery here is why did it take so, so freaking long for this to happen at a university?" he said. Goldsberry has hired 24 undergraduate students for Bevo Lab's first team, and they begin training with Google next week.
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