football

iPlayBook Football Free 5.019 Review

Football is arguably the most complex sport on the planet. It's often more like a 60-minute chess match than an active sport, with each coach trying to outmaneuver and outsmart their opponent. iPlaybook Football is designed to take the age-old art of playbooks and defensive/offensive play design and bring it into the 21st century with a dynamic, digital app.

The interface is on the cluttered side, largely due to the number of features and options, but that's also what makes it such a powerful tool for coaches. Although the app is fairly easy to use, you should … Read more

Get a ball's-eye view with camera in football

Do you really have enough camera angles when you watch a football game? Come on, you want more.

Feed your desire to be omnipresent with the wacky BallCam. It puts a camera inside the spinning football.

You'd think that would make you toss that mix of pizza, hotdogs, and beer in your stomach, but boffins at Carnegie Mellon University and Japan's University of Electro-Communications have made it a rather pleasant viewing experience.

CMU researcher Kris Kitani and UEM's Kodai Horita co-authored a paper on how algorithms in their prototype football can recognize footage of the ground as … Read more

FIFA to implement goal line tech in 2014 World Cup

Imagine yourself as England's Frank Lambard playing against Germany in a preliminary match during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. After kicking a solid game-tying shot, you watch the ball oddly bounce downward off the top rail, then in and out of the goal. Even though video footage proves otherwise, the referees disallow the score and Germany eventually goes on to win the game.

Fortunately, such epic miscalls seem less likely to happen during the 2014 World Cup and beyond, as the soccer-regulating organization FIFA plans to utilize a highly accurate sensor system capable of detecting successful shots and ensuring the referees should get the call right every time.… Read more

Internet usage sacked during Super Bowl for loss of 15%

Internet usage dropped 15 percent during the Super Bowl as the football-obsessed and casual fans alike huddled around their TVs to watch the showdown between the eventual NFL champion Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers.

That was the conclusion of a study released this morning by Sandvine, a firm that analyzes traffic on broadband networks.

And while hordes of people were pounding out tweets and Facebook status updates by the millions with their impressions on the Super Bowl ads, the blackout during the game -- and the companies that best leveraged social media during the power outage -- and, … Read more

Football-helmet sensor warns of concussion risk via phone app

As the Ravens take on the 49ers in New Orleans this weekend during the 47th Super Bowl, physicians will be on the lookout for more head injuries. There were over 160 in the 2012-13 NFL season, and it's become a larger problem as players get bigger and stronger.

The problem is that many concussions go undetected. Impakt Protective's Shockbox is a helmet g-force sensor that measures the impact a player sustains and gauges whether a medical assessment is in order.

The device can fit into any helmet with space amid the interior padding so that it's right … Read more

Super Bowl from the sidelines: Tech readiness is priority No. 1

It's always a treat to watch the game coverage by the peerless NFL on CBS team, which is the very best in the business. And backing up our amazing group of analysts and experts in front of the camera is a trained crew of CBS Sports production and technical pros behind the scenes.

Their No. 1 priority is to deliver the perfect angle of every play, along with the sophisticated replays, zoom, and hyper-broadcast detail that TV viewers have grown to love. The production logistics and technical complexity associated with broadcasting the Super Bowl are astounding. This year, CBS … Read more

Madden attempts to predict Super Bowl XLVII victor

Do you know who will win the Super Bowl in New Orleans this weekend? If you're a San Francisco 49ers or Baltimore Ravens fan, I can venture a guess as to who you might choose. But let's put aside your bias for a moment.

Using the video game Madden NFL '13, EA ran a mock game featuring the 49ers and Ravens to determine who would take home the Vince Lombardi trophy. If you think the prediction is hogwash, you're probably correct on some levels (it is just a video game, after all), but it's worth noting that the annual simulation resulted in correct predictions for seven out of the last nine Super Bowl showdowns. Such accuracy must mean something, right? EA summarizes the first few quarters: … Read more

Facebook milks Super Bowl mania to strut its football savvy

Super Bowl season is upon us, which amounts to television ads we might actually enjoy, too many men wearing makeup (a.k.a. face paint), and a ton of data mining on the social Web.

Far be it from Facebook to miss a golden opportunity to tell the world, particularly advertisers and marketers, how much it knows about us and our National Football League preferences. The social network's data science team has uncovered a few interesting bits about Facebook and football. Basically, we love to like our favorite teams.

Roughly 35 million Facebook users in the U.S. have … Read more

Manti Te'o's fake girlfriend was born and died on social media

Manti Te'o's tale was a portrait of a heartbroken football player overcoming adversity -- triumphing over the tragic death of his girlfriend.

The devout Mormon, Notre Dame linebacker, and runner up to the 2012 Heisman Trophy first suffered the loss of his grandmother, then his girlfriend to leukemia. On the day she died, he had one of the best games of his college career, logging 12 tackles.

The only problem is that she didn't die...because she apparently never existed.

In an exhaustive investigation, Deadspin's Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey detail how Te'o started dating … Read more

The new year is in gear

Welcome to 2013. We're getting ready to welcome America to a trifecta of supersize TV events in the next 40 days:

January 20: AFC Championship Game February 3: Super Bowl XLVII February 10: The 55th Grammy Awards

We call these "tent pole" events because they get most of America watching CBS, bringing them under our "big tent." The value of big event TV is more than just the audience gathered and the advertising dollars collected; it's the hugely valuable exposure we get for marketing our shows and building awareness for millions and millions of … Read more