There was a little bit of a rivalry between Witherspoon and Gonzalez, many had Gonzalez as the top CB in the draft and Whitherspoon surprised some by getting drafted 5th and then Gonzalez sliding all the way to 17th. Forbes going 16th was a shock no one saw coming, so we’ll just ignore that. This week Witherspoon blows up and Gonzalez goes down with a torn labrum, likely for the season.
I’m pulling for fellow Illini alum to win the DPOY.
Oh, great, I feel better now. LOL
Did anybody catch any of the Toy Story version of the England game involving the Jaguars? It was on an obscure ESPN channel, so I’ve only seen some highlights, but apparently they were able to show the game in “real time” by converting sensors in the players’ helmets into player animation. Pretty cool!
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I did not personally watch it but had a friend who volunteered. Said it was pretty well done but he wouldn’t want to watch more than a couple of drives, much less a whole quarter or game.
Clearly YMMV
It’s an interesting display of technology but I’m not sure there’s a practical use for it and it’s just a novelty. There were a couple of short clips where they showed a player’s eye view through a helmet cam that actually were very cool - I think it would be pretty interesting to see highlights and replays through that perspective. Of course rather than virtually modelling all of the players, you could instead just install a tiny camera into the helmets with a wireless feed, and now I’m actually wondering why this hasn’t been tried.
I watched about a half hour of it with my 2 year old. The technology was really impressive, certainly not perfect though. In many instances the ball would be bouncing between the center and guard pre-snap. TD passes seemed to always end up looking like incompletions because the system seemed to struggle to interpret that. The player tracking was remarkably good, as was the in flight characteristics of the ball. The different camera views were impressive too, but I don’t know how much was just them laying a filter on a real camera view versus them generating an imagined view entirely using AI. In both cases it was kind of amazing. One other thing we were wondering was how they did the commentary. At times it seemed live but at other times it seemed manufactured like a Madden game. I’m guessing it was a blend of both and I didn’t find the transitions noticeable.
I agree that this seems like way more of a technology study than a real product, but then again my toddler was interested for about 15 minutes. Which is approximately a 1000% increase over most anything else.
ESPN is reporting that RB Jonathan Taylor has agreed to a 3/$42 million contract extension with Indianapolis.
I don’t see a week 5 thread. Is there one?
There is NFL 2023: WEEK FIVE will get you ten