Murphy: With helmet cam, Eagles hope to remain NFL innovators

Outside the NovaCare Complex, a police officer was stopping traffic at a cement barricade reinforced with a garbage truck. Around the corner, a delivery van with a haphazard paint job and rooftop speakers proudly announced to passersby that it was the BernieVan. Up Broad Street, a city full of protestors was gathering for another collective expression of their displeasure.

Inside the NovaCare Complex, a sixth round draft pick was test-driving a new, helmet-mounted video camera that the Eagles hope will help their defensive backs evaluate and improve their head and eye movements while in pass coverage.

"The thing is, with technology, if it helps you win football games, I'm all for it," Eagles coach Doug Pederson said before he moved on to a question about the magic tricks his long snapper performed on the previous night's episode of America's Got Talent.

If the upcoming election does indeed result in the end of the world as we know it, the sedimentary record alongside Pattison Avenue will offer future historians plenty of fodder for their theses on how, exactly, things went wrong.

But enough about that. Let's talk about the camera.

In the wake of Chip Kelly's unceremonious dismissal as Eagles coach, it was fair to wonder whether the tumult that typified the end of the era would prompt the Eagles to make a reactionary pivot away from the NFL's vanguard. In addition to his gimmicky fastbreak scheme, Kelly brought with him to Philadelphia a obsession with doing things as they aren't currently being done, from measuring his players' sleeping patterns to monitoring their urine for signs of dehydration. Now that he was gone, would the commitment to innovation leave, too? As the Romans used to say, "quo vadis, smoothies?"

Six months after the Eagles hired Pederson to replace Kelly, one of the notable things about his reign is how much of his predecessor has remained. While the longtime NFL backup quarterback has, in his own words, "cut way back" on the team's sports science program, both he and his bosses have made it clear that they are determined to remain at the forefront of the NFL's information revolution. Owner Jeffrey Lurie spoke at length over the offseason about the team's desire to make good use of the player-tracking data that the NFL is providing, predicting that the information will "revolutionize the sport in the long run."

"When you're in charge of football operations, you're responsible for maximizing sports science," Lurie said.

The latest little step in that process was visible on the helmet of rookie cornerback Blake Countess during Wednesday's practice session at the NovaCare Complex. The camera is a metal, hot-dog-sized cylinder that is mounted near the logo on the left side of the shell. Countess, a sixth-round pick out of Auburn, wasn't sure exactly how the thing worked -- "At one point it beeped," he said -- but he was certainly aware of its potential benefit.

"Eye progressions," Countess said. "Just seeing where I'm looking at and being more disciplined with my eyes. Throughout the play, if your eyes are bad, you're probably going to get beat, especially as a defensive back."

The Eagles aren't the first team to test out helmet cams. In 2013, both the Bears and the Patriots outfitted their quarterbacks with the devices. A handful of colleges have also played around with them.

"In fact, we used them in the Kansas City with the quarterbacks," said Pederson, who spent the last three years as offensive coordinator under Andy Reid with the Chiefs. "We've had them on their helmets before. It gives you an opportunity to kind of see from the players' vantage point where they're looking, where their eyes are. Are they in the right direction? Are they on the right reads? And defensively are [they] in the right spots? And then you can evaluate and help correct the player.

"I know it's great with quarterbacks, because you definitely get that perspective on where he's looking. Obviously you can't tell who he's looking at, but you can tell the direction of where he's looking. You get great feedback with that kind of technology."

Fourth-string quarterback McLeod Bethel-Thompson, who spent last season in San Francisco, said the 49ers had a three-dimensional virtual-reality system that enabled players to don a pair of goggles and view a play as if they were actually inside of it. He said that the ability to view tape of eye movements is a huge benefit for players as they strive to perfect their progressions and reads.

"If you're missing on your eyes, you're done," he said.

Whether or not the helmet cam is here to stay, its presence at practice is another indication that the Eagles remain determined to stay ahead of the NFL's technological curve. The world might end, but at least we'll get to rewatch it from their vantage point.

@ByDavidMurphy

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