Coincidence? I think not. Just one day after a trash truck mishap resulted in parts of the Packers playbook being scattered about the streets of Green Bay, we find out that the Buccaneers have handed out iPads to their players instead of traditional playbooks. Head coach Raheem Morris has decided to try the new approach with his players, one that they will probably enjoy more than having to thumb through a traditional binder.
“We give these playbooks out, and by the end of training camp, we collect them so nobody sells them on the Internet,” Morris told the St. Petersburg Times via Shutdown Corner. “They become game books. If you need a reference to go back, you can pull up a blitz from camp and look at it.
“Then it got to the point where we said, ‘Hey, let’s put some of the video on there … from the season. How about practice? How would (Josh) Freeman like to go home and watch practice again? How would ‘Free’ like to sit there and watch third down from Detroit and Miami so when he comes to work the next morning, he’s seeing the tape again and putting it all together?'”
Frankly, I’m stunned more teams haven’t adopted this approach. You can do so many things with the iPad that one would think it would destroy the limitations of a regular binder full of sheets of paper. How long before someone designs an app specifically for football coaches to create plays on an iPad? Or does that already exist? Maybe someone should propose the idea to Carl Crawford’s agents.
