For years, the sophisticated play of professional teams trickled down to their college and high school counterparts. Recently, that flow has been reversed.

The situation was desperate for the Denver Broncos. On the first Sunday of the National Football League’s 2009 season, with only 28 seconds left in the game, they trailed the Cincinnati Bengals 7-6. The ball was on the 13-yard line — their own 13-yard line. On second down, Broncos quarterback Kyle Orton heaved the ball downfield, only to see a Bengals defender deflect the pass away from the receiver. And then something remarkable, close to miraculous, happened. Instead of falling to the ground, the ball popped into the air and landed in the outstretched arms of Broncos wide receiver Brandon Stokley, who started racing down the field. All across America, in living rooms and basements and sports bars, people broke into cries of wonderment and delight, heartbreak and disbelief.

Then they witnessed something even more startling.

Just before he reached the end zone, with 17 seconds remaining, Stokley cut right at 90 degrees and ran across the field. Six seconds drained off the clock before, at last, he meandered across the goal line to score the winning touchdown. For certain football fans, the excitement of a last-minute comeback now commingled with the shock of the familiar: It’s hard to think of a better example of a professional athlete doing something so obviously inspired by the tactics of videogame football. When I caught up with Stokley by telephone a few weeks later, I asked him point-blank: “Is that something out of a videogame?” “It definitely is,” Stokley said. “I think everybody who’s played those games has done that” — run around the field for a while at the end of the game to shave a few precious seconds off the clock. Stokley said he had performed that maneuver in a videogame “probably hundreds of times” before doing it in a real NFL game. “I don’t know if subconsciously it made me do it or not,” he said.

Brandon Stokley's time-killing run along the goal line was a tactic straight out of videogames.

Today’s football players have an edge that no athletes before them have possessed: They’ve played more football than any cohort in history. Even with the rise of year-round training, full-contact practice time on the field hasn’t increased — in fact, it has actually gone down, as coaches have tried to limit the physical punishment that the game exacts. But videogames, especially the ubiquitous Madden NFL, now allow athletes of all ages to extend their training beyond their bodies.

If you’re, say, an All-American quarterback at a top college program, odds are that you’ve been training on a very sophisticated, off-the-shelf simulator — a cross between a football tutorial and a real-time documentary, drizzled with addictive Skinnerian action-reward mechanics — for as long as you can remember. The many hundreds — even thousands — of hours that athletes put into videogame football give them more game experience (and, as Stokley demonstrated, sometimes more game awareness) than Bart Starr, Terry Bradshaw, or Joe Montana were able to log in previous eras. And there’s the possibility, too, that all this electronic play is changing the structure of their brains, at least in some ways, for the better.

For more than 30 years, sports videogames have been focused on simulating real-life athletics more and more perfectly. But over the past decade, games have moved beyond just imitating the action on the field. Now they’re changing it.

This revolution has sneaked up on many athletes, coaches, and fans. Sports and videogames — a combination that was one of the first diplomatic efforts in the emerging worldwide jock-geek armistice — have been interconnected since October 1958, when William Higinbotham, a nuclear physicist at Long Island’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, hooked up Tennis for Two, an electronic game of virtual tennis that is widely regarded as the first videogame. The first home videogame console, Magnavox’s Odyssey, included a digital version of table tennis, and then there was Atari’s Pong. The genre quickly expanded to baseball, basketball, football, auto racing, track and field, boxing, soccer, martial arts — if two or more people competed in something in the flesh, pretty soon they could compete in a digital version.

From the beginning, publishers and game designers were locked in an arms race of realism. George Plimpton mocked Atari 2600 owners for their underwhelming baseball game (Home Run) in a 1981 commercial for Mattel’s Intellivision console. (”Here’s an easy question for you,” Plimpton said. “Which of these games is the closest thing to the real thing?”) A couple of years later, a new wrinkle emerged when Electronic Arts signed Julius Erving and Larry Bird to the first-ever licenses to use athletes’ names and images in a sports game, 1983’s One-on-One. Soon there were releases like Tecmo Bowl and R.B.I. Baseball, which featured rosters of professional athletes playing for their real professional sports teams. It was a mind-blowing development for sports fans — and young athletes — who had previously been able to imagine themselves as their favorite players only during backyard pickup games.

Of all these games, John Madden Football — first published by Electronic Arts for the Apple II in 1989 and for the Sega Genesis console in 1990 — was perhaps the most committed to simulating its sport in all its complexity, including, for the first time, 11 players on each side. (”Most of my friends would tell you I started EA as an excuse to make a football game,” company founder Trip Hawkins says. “And there’s probably a fair amount of truth to that.”) Madden and its sequels became the most commercially successful sports videogame ever produced. (That success was cemented in 2004 by an exclusive license with the NFL that eliminated direct competitors.) In 2008, Madden NFL sold more copies than any other title except Wii Play, according to the research firm NPD Group, making EA an estimated $263 million. While John Madden’s career as an excitable TV commentator and analyst made him famous, the Madden videogame franchise — the Gospel of Coach John, available everywhere for $60 — has exerted a larger influence on football, from Pop Warner to the pros.

 

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This is an amazing phenomenon. It offers a contrast to the thought that in all cases video games are evil. What it may suggest is that both the positive and negative aspects of video games can transfer to reality more easily than you may think.

In 2005 I ran a football camp for middle school kids. On one rainy day we hooked up an x-box and in a large meeting room, had the group mimic the formations and strategy played out on the game. The kids loved it and it was a memorable moment for them at the camp.

The run by Stokley is online here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT5gTM2Qf-M&feature=player_embedded

By Libby Sander

The Boise State University Broncos don't shy away from the unconventional. After all, they're the only team in college football to play on a bright blue Astroturf field.

On Wednesday, the university's athletic director unveiled an unusual plan for raising money to build and renovate the institution's athletics facilities: The Broncos will sell 200,000 shares in a new nonprofit corporation, Boise State Broncos Inc., at $100 each. The anticipated $20-million in proceeds will pay for the construction of new and renovated athletics facilities.

So far, the Broncos have sold 1,200 shares, mostly to members of the new company's 12-person board.

"We are dependent on our supporters," the athletic director, Gene Bleymaier, said in a written statement. "If we are to continue the success we are enjoying now we must generate new revenues to pay for coaches' salaries, scholarships and facilities. Owning Bronco stock allows everyone to help us reach those goals."

Among the projects on the wish list is an end-zone expansion on the south end of Bronco Stadium, as well as new locker rooms for men's and women's basketball.

Bronco stock will not be publicly traded, will not pay any dividends, and the shares will not appreciate in value. Owning shares is not linked to seating privileges, either.

Instead, shareholders will receive a certificate stating their 'ownership,' and may participate in annual shareholders' meetings. They will also have the chance to vote for members of the new company's board of directors, and the cost of the shares is tax-deductible.

Though unusual, if not unheard of, in college sports, the Broncos' plan is not without precedent elsewhere. The NFL's Green Bay Packers took a similar approach in 1997, and now have more than 112,000 fans who own 4.7 million shares in the franchise.

And Boise State isn't alone in thinking creatively about new revenue streams. Big-time college sports programs, which incur significant expenses from their operations, athletics scholarships, and costly capital projects, are always looking for new ways to make money.

The University of California at Berkeley, for instance, recently embarked on a $1-billion campaign for its sports endowment. Berkeley's campaign is unusual not only in its ambitious goal but also in its approach. The campaign relies largely on the money derived from long-term seat licenses for football—not private donations—to boost the endowment. (Most major athletics programs typically use seat licenses to finance capital projects, not endowments.)

And Oklahoma State University raised eyebrows two years ago when it announced it had secured $280-million for capital projects and a sports endowment by taking out $10-million life insurance policies on 28 of its athletics boosters.

Boise State's approach has already generated buzz among some fans. As one put it, writing on One Bronco Nation Under God, a blog for the university's football fans, "I already feel like I have partial 'ownership' of this program. Now, I can donate another hundred bucks (which is far less than my usual annual gift to the university) and get a cool certificate for my wall. Count me in."

The Division III third-place game is an anachronism and its time has passed. So it’s good to see it go.

Although indeed, sometimes the third-place game is a spirited, wide-open entertaining affair, it cannot be ignored that the game often features one, if not two teams that truly don’t want to be there. Someone has had their heart ripped out the night before, must come back for a walk-through the next morning (though often a coach will pass on the team’s allotted time) and play a game which doesn’t do much except allow one team to go home with an extra win.

Of course, someone goes home with two losses at the end of a season that should be celebrated.

So, for the NABC to step in and do something immensely positive for Division III men’s basketball is a great step forward for our game. We hope the WBCA will consider doing something for women’s basketball as well.

This will give an additional 16 or so players who never would have gotten the Salem experience a chance to perform in front of Division III fans and be recognized. Fans who drove to southwestern Virginia to see their team play will have reason to stick around and see their best senior player or players in action the next day. And they’ll get to see a bunch of All-Americans on the floor as well, giving some context to fans who don’t get to watch D-III games on television.

It’s a win-win. And I hope it stays a part of the Salem experience for many years to come, like the NABC has done for Division I and Division II.

Having seen the old third place game in person, it will be nice to see players that actually want to be on the court in future years.