SPOTLIGHT: Focused on Winning
Aug 11, 2017 | Football
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With September 3 moving ever closer on the horizon, Aggie football's training camp is all about development.
And a critical part of development—maybe the most critical—is learning.
Through the hard work of the football coaches' video staff, and the tremendous investment by the program in state-of-the-art software and equipment, it's assured that the learning never has to stop.
"(Texas A&M players) have all the opportunities, or more opportunities, than any school in the country," said video coordinator James Duncan, now in his 20th year with the program.
Duncan, along with his full-time assistants Jae Fadde and Kaleb Wood, oversee a staff of about eight or nine students.
The group pulls off a finely-orchestrated dance of filming practice, shuttling the footage back into the office and importing each and every play and angles of those plays from the seven cameras shooting the action into the system.
"We are constantly shuttling tapes after every team period," Duncan explained. "We shoot to SD cards (the same ones in digital cameras) in high-definition. That footage is ingested in the system throughout practice and by the time the final whistle blows the only thing that's not finished is the very last period (of practice).
"The reality is, by the time Coach Sumlin talks to (the team) and they are stepping foot back in the building, everything is in the system."
Plays are then quickly marked by the graduate assistants for anything from down and distance, to play result, to alignments—you name it.
"All the plays are coded," Duncan said. "(A player or coach) can go in and watch every pass play, or every run play, from practice and anything in between. He can get as generic or specific as he wants."
The Bright Complex features 10 position-specific meeting rooms. If you count the main auditorium, that's 11. Each is wired into Texas A&M's XOS Thunder software system to be able to pull up any desired play or sequence of plays with the click of a mouse.
But of the many beauties of the system, its maybe most important feature is its portability. And A&M takes full advantage of that.
Every coach, along with almost every player, are furnished iPads that sync with the XOS Thundercloud.
And while the meeting rooms and the film system are always available to the players—they can and do come in on their own time—they don't have to.They can get a ton of film study done on their couch.
"That's the luxury of the iPad," Duncan said. "They don't have to be up here in the meeting room. They can go home and watch it."
Wide receivers can pull up only a certain set of the dozens of routes they ran. They can watch just their catches, or just their drops.
Offensive and defensive linemen can quickly scan their pass rushes, without having to look through every play from practice.
"Our plan is to watch film until it becomes second nature and know what the defense is doing maybe even before they know what they're doing," offensive lineman Connor Lanfear said. "And we have the absolute top-of-the-line equipment and top-of-the-line coaches. All of that comes in to play when you're prepping to play against a good team in the SEC. I think we've got as good a setup as anyone else in the country."
The XOS system also allows coaches to easily drill down to help a specific player focus on a specific play or plays—tailoring content quickly to maximize the learning curve.
"The coaches can draw on some of the video and send that to a player," Duncan said. "They can send a message like, 'Hey, I just watched practice, you need to watch these plays'. The player would get a notification with that message and then he can do that. Coaches can even make edits and send, say, five or whatever number specific plays for his kid to watch."
It's an incredibly efficient use of time and also allows players to be ahead of the game so to speak when it comes to the next day's meetings.
"To me, that's the biggest thing—especially during fall camp," Duncan said. "The iPads and the system give multiple opportunities at learning. Guys are able to watch video from practice before their (position) meetings, where they will watch it again."
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