Virtual Scout - The pitch

Film study can be drudgery. Hours and hours spent just figuring out which plays the other team does on average. Then comes drilling down in individual player performances. There is a lot of manual work that doesn’t need to be done by people. Virtual Scout make film study easy. Want to see all examples of 5 yard pass plays? Easy. What to know what percent of the time on 2nd and short they throw deep? Simple. Virtual Scout lets coaches focus on the real brain work in film study.

Virtual Scout - The fun part

I love computer vision, and this project has it in spades. Not only is 3D reconstruction an interesting problem, really good reconstruction could help determine if players have a tell, like in this story.  Then, there is also the statistics aspect. For example, knowing that when previously in a particular position the other team used one play 80% of the time is really powerful.

Virtual Scout - The growth potential

There are 32 NFL teams and over 100 FBS college football teams. If 100 teams got licences, that would be $2.5 million a year in revenue. Smaller football teams and even some high school teams may want licences. For a stripped down feature set, the product could be offered at $5,000 a year. Even with 1/5th the price, there could be five or ten times as many teams getting licences. This would grow the revenue to $5 million a year.

This could even expand beyond football to... well football (or soccer as we call it here). There are hundreds of football clubs large enough to want to use this software for their own film study. I expect that expanding to other sports could grow the revenue by another factor of 10 or to $50 million a year.

Virtual Scout - The monetization

The product sold to teams would be the software that makes the film database and analyzes each play and adds metadata about it (such as the formations and the outcome the individual player behavior). Each team would get a licence for the entire organization, which would give them access to cloud software.  They would upload the film, where it would be processed and available to everyone on the team to analyze. Interestingly, this software has a natural piracy deterrent: giving someone else a password gives them insight into what film you’ve been looking at and any notes you’ve added to different clips. Both college and professional football teams spend a lot of money on facilities and practice equipment. Compared to these other costs, $25,000 a year for a licence isn’t very much.

Virtual Scout - The idea

For college and professional football, there are a lot of video cameras at each game. The number of cameras vary from 5 to 62 per game. I couldn’t find a great source on this, but it looks like coaches get access to at least 2 film feeds (if not all of them). The two that the coaches get have views of all of the players on the field. Thankfully, two views of the players is all that is needed to make a 3D reconstruction of the playing field.

With the location of every player at every second of the game captured. It is then very easy to characterize each formation and play that happened. Suddenly, no work is required to get the distribution of formations a team uses or plays they run. If several weeks (or a year) of data is processed it’s possible to estimate the probability they will run a particular play in a given position on the field.

This can even give insight into individual players’ performance. How often does this defensive tackle get penetration and cause the running back to alter his path? What is the average amount of separation this wide reciever gets? Of the missed passes, how many are on the wide receiver and how many on the quarterback?

In addition to processing the film for statistics, this software could make a database of different plays a team has done. For example, a coach may want to show his players how much success the other team has had with the jet sweep. Also, the coach may want to see the common plays the opponent uses on 3rd and long where they actually get the first down. Practically all aspects of film study can be improved with automation.

Virtual Scout - The motivation

Football coaches spend a lot of time looking over film of opponents’ previous games. From the film they hope to understand which plays the other team likes to use in which situations. They also hope to get a sense for how the players react under different scenarios. All of this can be an extremely tedious process. This job could really benefit from some automation.