SCIENTIFIC METHOD
How data helps the franchise decide who plays, monitor physical well-being of players
Of all things to be resting on an ice machine, it's a laptop. A bespectacled man in a Texans hoodie clacks at the keys briefly, reaches into a grey backpack and pulls out a tablet. He sets the tablet next to the laptop, squints at both screens and nods.
An airhorn blares. Practice begins. Players jog around the pavilion toward the field. Key fob-sized sensors beneath shoulder pads send radio waves to receivers that hang high up in the surrounding light poles. Data streams into categorized charts in real time: total yards run, current speed, top speed, top acceleration.
By the end of Friday's practice, the bespectacled man, Jonah Rosner, closes the laptop, packs the backpack and joins his co-worker, Ryan Grubbs, to supply their supervisor, Matt Van Dyke, the most recent information before the franchise's final interdepartmental meeting of the week.
Welcome to the Applied Sports Science team. Van Dyke, the department's director, walks down a hallway inside NRG Stadium to join the other leaders of the team's other 10 subprograms in their thrice-weekly meetings with general manager Nick Caserio and head coach Lovie Smith.
It's here, usually on Fridays, where final decisions are made: Who plays where and how much? Who’s healthy, and if not, where do they stand in their recovery? How must a player’s workouts, diet and practice plan be altered to maximize the potential of his impeccable body?
Van Dyke is the man supplying science to the art of the team's decision-making, the technologist called upon in these meetings to provide objective information that can support what other staffers are seeing. He's a 33-year-old former Iowa State wide receiver, a bearded brainiac the Texans hired away from the University of Texas in April 2020 who was gifted his first weight set at 11 and fueled his interest in sports science by training his younger brother.
There is a marvelous complexity to the human body, Van Dyke knows. The abundance of advanced technology has yet to fully account for its phenomena. But beneath the bar of complete understanding, Van Dyke and his two-man team are studying myriad metrics to boost player productivity, identify injury trends and improve recovery plans when injuries occur.
“Anybody can collect data, right?” Van Dyke says. “It's what are you doing with that information that's really what's going to separate people in terms of making the best decision possible, and as new technology becomes available, having people around you that are willing to maybe step outside of the comfort zone of what they've done in the past.”
There is an organizational urgency that demands such willingness. The Texans are nearing the end of the second year of their rebuild, and as chair and CEO Cal McNair entrusts Caserio the financial freedom to manage the ever-visible struggles of the salary cap-strapped roster he's twice overhauled, McNair has also invested in the expansion of the sports science team.
Van Dyke was authorized in November 2021 to hire Rosner, a former co-worker at Texas, away from Austin FC, where Rosner was in charge of securing and analyzing data for the start-up soccer team. In April, Van Dyke hired Grubbs, who'd been a strength coach at Liberty University, Purdue and Ole Miss. Grubbs, an expert in biomechanics, now helps the Texans' strength staff build personalized workout programs for each player.
The Texans are a 1-11-1 team whose top assets are rookies and a handful of veterans. There are 18 players whose contracts expire after this season, and, according to Over the Cap, only five players will be a negative cap hit if they are released in the offseason.
The future faces of the franchise mostly take form in the wealth of draft picks and free agency dollars Caserio has yet to spend, which makes it all the more critical that subprograms like the sports science department are primed for the moment those players arrive.
Measuring progress
Van Dyke reaches over Desmond King's shoulder and taps a tablet attached to a weight rack. The nickel safety watches as his name flashes on the screen. The workout — back squat — is listed beneath his name. The tablet's camera stares back at King, transmitting his movement to an app called EliteForm, which measures the speed at which he lifts the weight on the bar.
EliteForm, one of many NFLapproved technologies Houston's sports science team deploys, tracks the progress of whavt's called “velocity-based training” in strength and conditioning circles. Sports organizations are becoming increasingly less focused on how much weight an athlete can lift and more centered on how fast an athlete can lift it.
Power is football's tangible unit of measurement. It's where an athlete's accelerated mass meets velocity. Van Dyke, who has written several books on the subject of force, lays out an example: Take a 500-pound squat. That's going to take a relatively long time to lift, yes? What use is it to train a football player to use their strength slowly when that hardly applies to anything that will happen in the game?
Think of how a defensive back bursts to keep pace with a wide receiver. How a receiver leaps to secure a catch. How defensive end charges off the line and how an offensive tackle shoves him backward. How a running back collides with a linebacker who's attempting to tackle him.
“When you're on the field, your foot might only be on contact with the ground for under a tenth of a second for your elitelevel athletes,” Van Dyke says. “So, it's not necessarily about who can generate the most force across a long period of time. It's who can generate the most force in a really small amount of time while maintaining good body position.”
All the technologies at the sports science team's disposal are essentially geared toward measuring that same concept. They monitor the progress of their players, who jump and perform other tasks on electronic platforms called “force plates,” which measure how much force each player generates. They can film a player's movements on the field or in the weight room and drop the video into artificial intelligence programs that map out the player's muscular mechanics.
They also use a metallic box called a 1080 Sprint in which a player hooks himself up to an unwinding cable, sprints, and has the power, force and speed of his progress measured by each isolated step. The staff can then identify asymmetries and Grubbs can help train the player to spread out the mechanics of his strides more evenly.
“The amount of time that you have available to execute the task is going to dictate how proficient you are at that skill,” Van Dyke says.
The human body obviously also has its limitations. Proficiency decreases with fatigue. Van Dyke and his staff are tracking each player's movement in every practice using those sensors the player wears beneath his shoulder pads — two GPS systems called Catapult and Zebra — and just like they can measure the total amount of weight a player lifts in a given week, they can measure the workload and output of a player on the field.
“We can now quantify that on the field by the number of hard accelerations, hard decelerations, how fast an athlete moves, how many yards they cover throughout the day and throughout the week and throughout a season,” Van Dyke says.
Creating a plan
There's generally a specific moment in-season when Van Dyke is called upon to speak in the team's weekly meetings. When a player begins to have a drastic decrease in their outputs on the force plate, when his data starts to drag in other measurements, it's up to Van Dyke to explain the downward trend and provide a suggestion to rectify the situation.
There are multiple reasons why a player's output can decrease. Sometimes the root cause is unexplainable. Sometimes it's as simple as a reserve player's role increasing in both practice and the games.
Hypothetically take a player like Tremon Smith, who didn't play a defensive snap all season until starting cornerback Steven Nelson exited Sunday's game against the Cowboys with an ankle injury. Smith, the team's third-most used special teams player, logged 52 extra defensive snaps in Dallas, and he's poised to start against the Chiefs again in Nelson's absence.
Van Dyke and the Texans coaching staff would be leery of Smith's increased workload, and, if his metrics suddenly started to decrease, they'd collectively decide whether to diminish the amount of time he practices during the week, amend his workout plan, have him focus more on body recovery or alter his in-game role.
“We don't like to see large swings (of data) up and down,” Van Dyke says. “That's really what it becomes, and we know that when we sit down with the coaching staff. Understanding those changes that may happen due to availability, that's why we get together on Monday. That way, we can create a plan that's effective.”
The composition of the front office, the coaching staff and the roster affects that overall plan, too. Lovie Smith, a third-time NFL head coach, has often spoken about how certain players fit the profile of their position. Caserio, who spent 20 years with the Patriots, has formed his own opinion on how certain positional body types should be composed.
Van Dyke says Caserio, Smith and the subprogram leaders meet even more frequently in the offseason to hash out their philosophies and make sure they've established a consensus of how they want to develop the players. The Texans have had three head coaches and two general managers in the last three seasons, and as the franchise veers toward another offseason, its sports science team is engaged in generating the answers when called upon.
“Our goal is with every piece of technology or every data point that we collect is that it should be funneled into an attempt to answer a question, especially with the amount of metrics that are available at this point,” Van Dyke says. “We don't want to just collect information and have it sitting there. Every piece is trying to answer that question of, ‘Have we made this athlete unbreakable?'”