Gamers make the call, play for cash, in new app
VERO BEACH, Fla. – On July 13, 1980, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported on the big news the previous night: Fans used cable boxes tethered to their TVs to call the offensive and defensive plays of a semiprofessional football game between the Columbus (Ohio) Metros and the Racine (Wis.) Gladiators.
The interface, used effectively for interactive game shows and boxing scoring, was clunky and slow. The cable company, QUBE, an experiment in 30,000 Columbus homes funded by Warner-Amex, was innovative.
But it didn’t have the technology to pull off what Julie Meringer’s tech startup, Your Call Football, did on a recent night in Florida: live-streaming a fulllength, professional game in two hours while allowing fans anywhere to call offensive plays on their smartphones.
“I am elated,” Meringer, the Massachusetts-based company’s president, said of her team’s performance last week at Historic Dodgertown in Vero Beach. “There were some bugs, but I’m really pleased.”
The game was a dress rehearsal for the first of three Thursday games starting at 8:30 p.m. ET this week. The games will be about more than football. Cash and other prizes will be on the line for fans who call the most effective plays on the Your Club Football phone app.
The games will be the culmination of five years of development for Meringer, whose former boss at Forrester Research, George Colony, tasked her with creating the product.
The May kickoffs will help determine whether the company can financially thrive getting about 90 hungry, former NFL, CFL and college players together as live-action figures in a video game played on phones.
It’s a far cry from pop’s old Strat-OMatic game. Even Madden’s great graphics can’t compare with real people attempting to execute plays you’ve called.
“All fans since the time of Adam and Eve have wanted to do this,” now-de- ceased Allie Sherman, a former New York Giants coach and Warner-Amex consultant, told The Enquirer in 1980. It’s no different today.
“It was interesting to see how fans would do,” said Merril Hoge, a former NFL player and ESPN analyst who coached Team Power to a 15-14 win the other night. “As a group they collectively made the right decisions.”
Fans have 10 seconds to make the call after Hoge and Mike Sherman, Your Call Football’s Team Grit coach, load a bundle of three plays in the app, depending on the situation.
The offensive team runs the play a majority of fans want. Fans receive points three ways:
❚ If the play is successful and you called it. If it’s not, you could lose points.
❚ If the play selected fails but you picked a different play.
❚ If you pick the same play the coach voted for.
Similar to fantasy football, fans compete against each other in game- or season-long contests and set up their own leagues. Fans with the most points in games or during three-games series can take a share of more than $50,000 in cash prizes, according to the app’s website.
Fans’ decisions included lots of risky pass plays early on.
“You roll with the punches,” Hoge said of when fans pick a play he would not have chosen. “(But sometimes you’re like) ‘ Why would you call that play? … Great call!’ ”
BJ Daniels, the former South Florida and NFL quarterback who engineered the winning drive, suggested fans might not be as tactical as coaches.
“It’s a really interesting concept,” he said, noting that he ran a sprint out to the right about five times in the second half alone. “It was a fan favorite. Sometimes it worked.”
But Your Call Football is more about innovation. It’s ironic the company is spending six weeks at Historic Dodgertown. Seventy years ago there Branch Rickey created a newfangled training facility for baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers, whose Jackie Robinson had broken baseball’s color barrier the year before.
The phone app is innovative. Fans watch the live stream in the top part of the app or follow the game in a more static fashion. A few ads are strategically placed. A bell rings when the coach sends his bundles, including diagrams, to fans, and they pop up on the screen.
If you’re a serious user, it is essential to have a good data or Wi-Fi connection and a full charge. Make sure you’re signed in and know your password. The game is fast-paced — there are no TV timeouts or scheduled breaks other than at quarters — and you can compare your scores in a leaderboard.
Even the streaming production is different from other football games, according to Ryan Halkett, who produces the games for Lagardère Sports.
The focus is not on a viewer, but a gamer. That means a faster pace, limited dead time and, from the commentators, information that helps fans better decide what plays to select, he said.
But the real high-tech stuff comes from Phenix, a Chicago-based software company that claims to stream video with almost no lag time.
“You want the viewer to see the action as close to real time as possible,” Andreas Schuler, a Phenix software engineer, said of Your Call Football, adding how important it is to get the play-calling done quickly. “If it takes 10 or 20 seconds before I see the video, I’m going to delay everybody else.”
In fact, the standard video delay during last week’s scrimmage seemed like less than a second.
“It shows you what 40 years of technology will do,” said Sheldon Zoldan, an associate producer for the QUBE experiment who now works for the NewsPress in Fort Myers.
If Your Call Football’s three games this spring prove to investors the idea works, it could end up a household name like Madden or DraftKings.
If not, Your Call Football could end up like QUBE and other bold, interactive companies whose products were ahead of their time.