In 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue became the first supercomputer to defeat a chess grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, in a game. A year later Deep Blue edged Kasparov 3 1/2–2 1/2 in a full match. Why should you, a football fan, care? Because, as the late linebacker Junior Seau once said, “football is a chess game.”

Deep Blue defeated Kasparov by brute force, scanning through 200 million moves per second. And, ominously, over the last two decades that computational force has only gotten more brutal. At chess tournaments played in Bilbao, Spain, in 2004 and ’05, a team of three computers defeated their human opponents 8½–3½ and 8–4, respectively. But that was two decades ago. modern smartphones make even Deep Blue look painfully slow: A Samsung Galaxy S5, for example, can perform 140 billion floating-point operations per second, more than 10 times the speed of IBM’s old machine. Moore’s Law predicts that computational power doubles roughly every two years, so by Super Bowl 100, in 2066, computers should be several million times faster than today. Imagine a robot Bill Belichick flicking through a digital playbook of trillions of moves during the 40-second gap between plays.

The BCS computers already made their mark in the college game, before a human-only playoff committee overthrew them last year. The computers were either a digital force for good or evil, depending on whether they raised or lowered your school’s ranking. A company called Edge Up Sports is using Watson, IBM’s cognitive computing system, to gain an edge in fantasy football. Jim Rushton, head of IBM’s Sports & Entertainment division, predicts that in the next few years Watson could help teams predict and reduce injuries, and pick the best players from the draft.

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To address the perception that brain injuries are epidemic in the NFL, the league donated millions to fund research on the subject. Scientists have learned a lot since, but we still can’t diagnose chronic traumatic encephalopathy in living people, and some players are giving up the game in fear of a disorder that might never affect them.

By 2012, the NFL had a brain problem. Five days before Super Bowl XLIII, in 2009, Boston University neuropathologist Ann McKee held a press conference across the street from Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium to discuss chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Nine months later McKee testified at a congressional hearing, and in February 2010, Time magazine did a cover story on football calling it “The Most Dangerous Game.” Beginning in August 2011 more than 4,500 former players sued the NFL, accusing the league of hiding the dangers of concussions. In May 2012, Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau fatally shot himself, and an autopsy showed he had CTE.

The NFL settled the lawsuit for $765 million in April 2015. That October, PBS aired League of Denial, a documentary based on the book of the same name by Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru- Wada, who detailed what they called the league’s “concussion crisis.” Across America parents were pulling their kids off the field, concerned that the children’s brains and psyches would be permanently damaged. From 2010 to ’12, participation in Pop Warner football dropped 9.5%.

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If football is going to exist in 50 years, we are going to need to solve the problem of brain trauma. Five high school players have died this year from head injuries. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease linked to repetitive brain trauma, has so far been found in the brains of more than 100 deceased ex-NFL players. As popular as the NFL might be, this crisis is shaking its foundations. In April, a Harris Poll of 2,012 adult Americans found that 89% believed concussions were a moderate to severe health concern, and 25% would not let their children play some contact sports because of a fear of concussions.

History, though, offers football fans a glimmer of hope. Back in the 1900s, football survived a similar existential crisis. Players were being crushed and were dying from head trauma. On the East Coast, Columbia abolished football and Harvard threatened to do the same. On the West Coast, Berkeley and Stanford switched out football for rugby. But radical changes—including the forward pass—saved the game. And less than two decades later, the NFL was born.

So can today’s league solve the concussion problem? Not exactly, says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, and associate director of Harvard’s Football Players Health Study. “Concussions have been around for a long time, since the stone age probably,” he says. “There’s nothing new about concussions.” The injury is a natural consequence of impact, and as long as football remains a contact sport, players will still suffer concussions.

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NFL teams already use high-end noise-canceling headphones on the sidelines but the receivers inside players’ helmets have to fight ambient noise. In the future there may be a way for coaches to send signals that not even the loudest crowd could drown out. In the next few weeks the Cowboys and a Dallas-based startup called MindTalk will begin testing prototypes of a mouth guard fitted with a small receiver during practice. The signal from the sideline is converted into vibrations by the mouth guard. Those vibrations travel through the player’s teeth to his jaw bone then to his inner ear, where they stimulate the cochlea just as incoming sound waves would. “You don’t actually hear it,” explains Nick Fragnito, one of MindTalk’s founders. “It almost feels like the voice inside your head.”

Fragnito, 25, and cofounder Rob Burke, 24, got their idea from their days playing football and from a musical trinket of their youth. In 1998, Hasbro made a lollipop holder called Sound Bites that used bone conduction to let kids listen to music while they sucked on a treat. MindTalk repackaged that technology and now hopes to use it for more than child’s play.

(full article published in Sports Illustrated, October 12, 2015)

With the rollout this season of RFID (radio-frequency identification) player-tracking technology in every NFL stadium—bottle-cap-sized chips are embedded in every set of shoulder pads—the league can keep tabs on all of its players the same way that businesses do their inventories. The system, provided by Zebra Technologies and still largely kept under wraps by the NFL, is geared partly toward improving the TV experience, but when that data is opened up to fans and teams, things could get really interesting. We could soon see the routes every player runs, answering the question, Which Patriots receiver best matches up with Tom Brady? Strength and conditioning coaches could slice and dice data to extract whatever performance metrics they most care about—How far does Adrian Petersonactually run in each game?—and use that information to fine-tune training methods.

Zebra’s system, though, is really only data lite. This setup tracks a player’s pads, not the human wearing them. To truly understand what each athlete goes through requires far more detailed telemetry. As a hint of where that is headed, consider: Zebra’s tags can also be used as communication hubs to relay info from any Bluetooth devices that a player might be wearing.

The next big question: How far are players and coaches willing to go to gain an edge? Forget fitness wearables like Apple Watches and Fitbits—pushing limits on the field will require pushing far more personal limits. As director of Elite Performance for STATS LLC, Paul Robbins explores the world of wearables, patches and sensors on behalf of pro teams, and to show the future of the field, he carries around a half-inch by one-eighth-of-an-inch medical implant used for tracking heart rhythms. “When guys complain about a patch,” Robbins says, “I pull out the implant and say, ‘We could just imbed this into your chest.’ ”

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Last year was supposed to be a big one for Angela Naeth. The 33-year-old from British Columbia finished fifth in her first full Ironman triathlon late in 2013 and sixth in her second in the spring of 2014, then signed with Red Bull that June. During the summer she cut back on competing to focus on a season-ending trip to the spiritual home of triathlon: the Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii. But one thing stopped Naeth from making that journey: She’s a woman.

Since 2011 the World Triathlon Corporation, which runs Ironman, has enforced a 50/35 split between the 85 male and female pros qualifying for Kona. Ranked No. 40, Naeth would have made the cut if she were a man.

“If someone like Angela Naeth has to extend her season to make it [to Hawaii],” says Julia Polloreno, editor-in-chief of Triathlete magazine, “there’s something that’s not right with that system.” Since missing out on Kona last year, Naeth has won two Ironman races, including a North American championship in May in The Woodlands, Texas.

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There are no 6′ 7″, 400-pound players in the NFL, but there are two that huge playing or committed to play college ball; Baylor junior tight end LaQuan McGowan and BYU offensive/defensive lineman Motekiai Langi, who will suit up in 2017 after a two-year Mormon mission in Arizona. Each has athleticism that belies his size. McGowan ran the 40 in 5.42 seconds last year, when he weighed closer to 440 pounds. BYU has never seen Langi, 18, on a football field, but Cougars coaches offered him a scholarship after watching him play basketball and rugby in his native Tonga, during which he showed impressive speed and coordination.

Does the emergence of these two behemoths suggest that Baylor coach Art Briles is right in predicting a rise in 300- pound skill-position players within 20 years? The average height and weight of quarterbacks, receivers, running backs and tight ends in the NFL has increased by 3.7 inches (to 6′ 1.7″) and 45.3 pounds (to 224.8) since the league’s inception in 1920. But even allowing for that growth, McGowan and Langi would still be extreme physiological outliers.

(full article published in Sports Illustrated, August 10, 2015)

Red Bull doesn’t do anything by halves. When the energy drink manufacturer decided to get into Formula 1 it didn’t buy just one team, it bought two. The company owns or sponsors four professional soccer teams, including the New York Red Bulls, and runs a host of adventure sports events. And, in October 2012, Red Bull sponsored Felix Baumgartner’s skydive from the edge of space, during which he became the first human to break the sound barrier without a plane or rocket ship.

So when Red Bull wanted to find a way to push its athletes further and for longer, it didn’t just drag them into the gym or the performance lab, it took them to the lowest place in North America, Death Valley, and the highest city in California, Mammoth Lakes. And invited along a gang of academics and fitness tech innovators to push them and probe them.

Let’s be clear, little of this seems to be specifically about selling a caffeinated, sugary energy drink. From a marketing perspective, owning two F1 teams offers little value—even if one of them wins, the other loses. And a makeshift laboratory run out of the back of a white truck parked alongside US 395 northwest of Bishop, Calif., in late May was about as far from an obvious marketing opportunity as you could get. Sure, the awning of the attached canopy was adorned with Red Bull logos, and there was a limitless supply of Red Bull, but there were no adoring fans in sight, no media other than me.

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Greg Long had spent more than 15 years of his life chasing big waves. Surfing giants was all about the rush, the adrenaline, the achievement. Finding bigger and better waves, pushing his personal limits. But surviving big waves? That was all about preparation.

“There’s consequences to what we do,” Long says. “Each one of those boxes we don’t check as far as the preparation, it’s just opening up a slightly larger margin for error for something to go wrong.”

In December 2012, on his never-ending quest to ride the greatest wave of his life, something did go wrong. Long was held under by a set of mammoth 50-foot waves at Cortes Bank, an underwater sea mount 90 miles southwest of Los Angeles. Six minutes later, unconscious and just barely alive, he was pulled to safety and given oxygen aboard his support boat.

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