Data Center

The NFL IT Locker Room Provides Access, Storage and Analytics [#Infographic]

With the league increasingly relying on technology to gain a competitive advantage, its investments in cutting-edge IT have also kicked into high gear.

Ricky Ribeiro

Google+ Twitter

Ricky publishes and manages the content on BizTech magazine's website. He's a writer, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all-around digital guy.

Professional football has gone geek. Football players — who have historically been judged on their grit, tenacity and ability to intimidate the opposition — are now openly professing their love for data.

As part of a panel hosted by Intel in September, NFL Hall of Famer Jerry Rice gushed about being in awe of IT.

“If I had all the data and all of that stuff back when I played football, the 1,500 catches that I had, over 20,000 yards, 208 touchdowns, I think I probably would have just doubled everything,” he said, in an article on SiliconANGLE.

Rice’s admiration is just one example of the tech takeover that’s happening in the NFL. Various teams across the league have recently made bold, innovative, tech-infused changes to their programs.

The Falcons used advanced analytics to make draft decisions, and the 49ers are hard at working building a data warehouse to store all kinds of data that will allow the team to improve the game-day experience for fans by tracking their behavior.

The demand for data is forcing rapid growth in storage needs too. The Washington Redskins team has seen explosive data growth in its operations, with its corporate data growing from 4 terabytes to 15TB over the past couple of years, according to team officials.

(Learn more about the Redskins major-league IT investments in the feature, “Washington Redskins Go State-of-the-Art with iPad, UC and Wi-Fi Deployments.”)

We took some of these case studies and compiled additional NFL IT facts to build out this infographic of the NFL IT locker room. Given the rise of technology in the league, it’s only right that we make room for servers, racks and switches among the helmets and jerseys because technology is well on its way to becoming an MVP.

Check out the full infographic from BizTech below. Click to enlarge.