“We’ve never had anything like this that we can offer to our players, to have a product where it does all that AI performance [analysis],” Hula Bowl owner Jennifer Logan said. “That’s our biggest thing, to be able to give that knowledge to our players, because this is a very important week for them, where they’re having this opportunity to showcase and they want to be at their best.”In today’s edition of Power Up:

• NFL, Sony debut new coaches’ comms
• BeOne providing data at Hula Bowl
• TGL adds FanDuel, KPMG as corporate sponsors

BeOne needs only a smartphone camera to collect data on athlete movements and joint angles. Where it differs from other products is its generalized approach that can be applied across a dozen sports, an NIL-centric model for training its algorithms and spreading its brand, and a stated willingness to collaborate with other tech companies.

Sony and the NFL introduced a prototype of the league’s new official coach-to-coach communication headset on stage at CES on Monday night. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell joined Sony Group Corporation President Hiroki Totoki and Sony Electronics President Neal Manowitz on stage for the unveiling of the device, which will include Sony’s noise-cancelling and sound quality technologies and be powered by Verizon’s 5G network. Sony became an official NFL technology partner in July, and the new headset will debut on the sidelines during the 2025 season. Goodell referred to coach-to-coach communication as “one of the most critical parts of our game.” The headset branding is perhaps the most camera-visible sponsorship inventory in the league. In 2023, Navigate research estimated coaches’ headset TV exposure at more than eight minutes per game, which equates to a media value of $72M. The sponsorship category had remained vacant since Bose left in 2022.  

Players’ personalities will be on display as they will be wearing mics, but it will be on those players to deliver. The “Showdown” and past iterations of “The Match” series have fallen flat due to a lack of trash talk, or players just not giving much emotion period.

Mobile motion capture provider BeOne Sports is the official technology partner of this week’s Hula Bowl, where it will track the college football All-Star Game’s athletes through practice and combine drills.TGL made its debut last night, and SBJ’s Josh Carpenter was on location at SoFi Center in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. to offer his analysis of the new league’s rollout. Perhaps the biggest victory of the league? A blazing pace of play. – Ethan Joyce“With the advent of NIL and the NCAA and everything else that student athletes are actually earning money passively,” he added, “but also engaged in this global goal to train kids around the world.”Deans said too much emphasis in sports continues to be placed on the output — ball trajectory, exit velocity, spin rate, etc. — and not enough on the human input creating that outcome. One of BeOne’s key executives, Chief Data Scientist James McNaney, is also a user. He is a two-time All-American javelin thrower who finished 17th at the 2024 US Olympic trials.A number of questions remain for TGL to answer. Non-major golf struggled mightily last year on TV, with PGA Tour Sundays down 19% and LIV Golf failing to gain much traction on The CW. The recent “Showdown,” featuring four of the most popular players in the game, barely cracked 600,000 viewers. How will TGL fare on Monday and Tuesday nights during the winter months? Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, the league’s founders alongside Mike McCarley, won’t compete until later in the season (Woods next week), a strategic move by the league to attract more viewers past Week 1.The opening match tees off at 9pm ET.Founded by a self-described “former almost professional athlete” — Scott Deans, a kicker/punter at Portland State in the late 1990s, had a tryout with the 49ers but didn’t make the team — BeOne has partnered with 165 pro and college athletes to be brand ambassadors. Among them is Inter Miami FC goalkeeper Drake Callender, University of Texas kicker Bert Auburn and Kansas basketball All-American Hunter Dickinson.
BeOne is now seeking primarily B2B clients, such as schools, clubs and academies. Rice University is the first NCAA athletic department to sign on, with the school’s office of innovation also joining as a strategic partner. At the Hula Bowl, BeOne will be used during practice sessions and individual work — such as 40-yard dash running mechanics, vertical jump and more — to compile a player performance package on each of the 100-plus participants that will be shared with athletes, coaches and scouts.After pro football didn’t work out, Deans became an architect and then a manager overseeing data analysis for oil company BP. While enrolled in Rice’s executive MBA program, the idea for BeOne began as a class project and evolved into a business upon graduation, with the startup raising 0,000 to date and in the process of a subsequent .4 million investment round.The potential of biomechanics is important — 3MotionAI, Sportsbox, Mustard and Uplift Labs are among the competitors to operate within the smartphone sector of the category — Deans is quick to acknowledge that such a solution won’t answer every question. That’s why he has put out an open call to complementary technologies to collaborate, and he’s noted a few early-development projects seeking to do exactly that.BeONE SportsGetty ImagesDespite the questions, TGL has reason for optimism. It’s on ESPN and features a strong lead-in tonight with No. 4 Duke taking on Pitt. In addition to KPMG and FanDuel, it has 11 other official corporate partners and has well-heeled stick-and-ball sports owners as financial backers. And it offers something different, with matches expected to take only two hours.

TGL

TGL has added a pair of new partners ahead of its launch on Tuesday night, with both FanDuel and KPMG joining the league’s growing portfolio of sponsors. FanDuel joins TGL as an official sports betting partner and will have social and digital integrations and sponsor an intermission between two sessions on match nights. KPMG is signing with TGL as its official performance insights and analytics provider, and its “Performance Insights” program will be used for TGL matches. KPMG will have both broadcast and digital integration.“I believe there’s an irony occurring in sports tech, which is there’s very little teamwork,” Deans said. “It’s understandable — sports founders and competitors, we want to win. We’re out to build value for our customers and our stakeholders and everything. But I’m sitting here going, ‘Well, there’s nobody, no company, who has the full performance picture. We’re all building really cool things, but if we just got together and actually built stuff together, we’d make a major impact.’”“Motion capture allows us to focus on the human,” he said, noting the use of AI to understand patterns in movement and producing “rapid feedback on the field, not later, while you’re assessing all your data and looking at film. It’s on-field AI in order to make the very next rep better with this new information, so flattening the learning curve, if you will.”The league makes its long-awaited debut tonight in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., featuring a matchup of New York Golf Club and The Bay Golf Club at the SoFi Center. Officials said tickets have sold out for the opening two weeks at the venue, which has a capacity of around 1,500.“They have become the proxy for learning in our database,” Deans said. “The whole BeOne concept is that we can use technology to unlock the talents that currently live in all the amazing athletes of today, and those movements, those skill sets, are digitized into our platform.”“The convergence of my careers — from architecture and systems design, with performance and understanding data, with the latest now becoming an expert in AI/ML applications in business — I said, ‘Well, I need to go converge all this into my sports passion, which is really about using technology to help people learn,’” Deans said. “So BeOne is really focused on democratizing access to the cutting edge for people who you likely don’t know it’s for them. So we’re building it simpler, faster and more versatile than really anything on the market.”On Tuesday’s edition of Buzzcast, SBJ’s Abe Madkour touches on the launch of TGL Tuesday night and the start of a new era for the sport.