College football teams go to great lengths to prevent opposing teams from stealing their signs, but one college coach seems to think it’s time for college football to embrace technology to do that, instead.
During a recent appearance on the Andy Staples On3 podcast, West Virginia Mountaineers head coach Neal Brown called out the problem of sign-stealing, saying that college football needs to embrace in-helmet communication to prevent it from happening.
“I just think, if you look at our college sidelines, they look like clown shows right now,” Brown told Andy Staples on Andy Staples On3. “Different colored shirts, a bunch of people. The staffs have become so big and there’s people that are just designed to do that. People have real systems. And so I think man, we need to clean that up.
“I’ve been a huge proponent of this, probably for the last three years, is the technology’s there. It makes no sense for us not to be able to do it. The helmet manufacturers are okay with it. We used it in the bowl game. It was very good for us. I could talk directly, as the play-caller, I talked directly to the quarterback. Our defense coordinator talked directly to the linebackers and safeties. The thing that probably surprised me, I knew the benefits offensively, how it’d benefit us. But it really helped us defensively.”
This sort of communication is used in the NFL. We’ll have to see if college football decides to embrace it.
[On3]
About Kevin Harrish