Timothy Foster needed something to look forward to when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma last summer. The 35-year-old software developer, from upstate New York, knew he would have lots of time to kill while he recovered from his chemotherapy infusions, but what is there to do when you're laid up in bed all day? Yes, he had owned an NES and SNES in the '90s, but the last video game he had played in earnest was NCAA Football 14--a beloved 2013 college football simulator that was the final entry in a series that was discontinued following an arcane legal dispute between the powers that be in campus athletics and publisher EA Sports. But the landscape of college football has changed dramatically over the past few years, following a windfall of suddenly legal name, image, and likeness deals that freed up players to make money from outside sources. All this ultimately cleared a path for a revival of the one video game Foster ever truly loved.

An analytics revolution comes for every sport sooner or later. MLB had Moneyball in the early 2000s and has moved well beyond it in the years since. The NBA has used efficiency to all but kill the mid-range jump shot. Soccer has seen an influx of countless new ways to measure passes and scoring chances down to the finest detail. The NFL's change became most evident in 2018. Computer models that looked at thousands of games found an inefficiency: Coaches were being too conservative on fourth down, when teams can either punt the ball away or go for an all-or-nothing conversion.

Multiple brain injury criteria (BIC) are developed to quickly quantify brain injury risks after head impacts. These BIC originated from different types of head impacts (e.g., sports and car crashes) are widely used in risk evaluation. However, the accuracy of using the BIC on brain injury risk estimation across different types of head impacts has not been evaluated. Physiologically, brain strain is often considered the key parameter of brain injury. To evaluate the BIC's risk estimation accuracy across five datasets comprising different head impact types, linear regression was used to model 95% maximum principal strain, 95% maximum principal strain at the corpus callosum, and cumulative strain damage (15%) on each of 18 BIC respectively. The results show a significant difference in the relationship between BIC and brain strain across datasets, indicating the same BIC value may suggest different brain strain in different head impact types. The accuracy of brain strain regression is generally decreasing if the BIC regression models are fit on a dataset with a different type of head impact rather than on the dataset with the same type. Given this finding, this study raises concerns for applying BIC to estimate the brain injury risks for head impacts different from the head impacts on which the BIC was developed.

Football is back and fans across the country are sporting their favorite player jerseys and cheering on their top teams. There are a number of ways to get ready for kick-off--prepping the delicious tailgate food and upgrading to a big-screen TV to name a few--but did you know that your Amazon Echo can help you do even more to celebrate the return of football season? Whether you have the ever-popular Echo Dot or the screen-enabled Echo Show, there are plenty of ways that the Alexa-enabled speakers can help you out this season. Planning a watch party and need to find out when the game is on? Or maybe you want to check the latest stats on your hometown team?

Guam - While preparing for the first Saturday of college football for the 2011 season, I took a dinner break from studying charts, rosters, matchups and the pre-season Top 25 polls to watch one of my favorite shows, Modern Marvels on History Channel. It just so happened that the episode I caught profiled the technology used to manage crops. And remarkably, in a vignette about how grapes are picked en masse, the producers strongly emphasized a major advantage used in such work to achieve optimal systemic results: the harmonious synergy of man and machine. About 20 minutes hence, the episode having concluded and a delicious berry salad already beginning to digest in my belly, my thoughts returned to all things pigskin, wondering if the Bowl Championship Series, which utilizes the average of two human polls and a computer poll, might actually generate more reliable, reproducible results if it were run exclusively on machine learning. Let me break it down for you.