The NFL is already littered with former Alabama players on rosters. Now, it’s taking an idea born in Tuscaloosa and making it a standard policy on sidelines.
Following the conclusion of the NFL owners meeting today in Chicago, Roger Goodell announced that medical tents will now be used on sidelines this season. Those tents, of course, were first utilized at the University of Alabama in 2015.
The tents prevent fans, media and opponents from seeing injury evaluations on the sidelines, and it’s genius. In 2016, other college football programs began to implement the idea on their sideline, too.
Everyone knows how secretive coaches are now-a-days. If a player gets injured during a game, he immediately goes in the tent and gets evaluated. Previously, most everyone could determine what part of the player’s body doctors were looking at, but that’s much more difficult following the evaluation tent.
Alabama helped four senior-level mechanical engineering students — with the help of Jeff Allen, who oversees the sports medicine training staff for Alabama’s athletic department — file for a patent before it debuted in 2015.
“It’s really important we do our due diligence to capitalize on the opportunity,” co-founder Patrick Powell said in early 2016. “There’s still a tremendous amount of work to be done. We’ve only made one. It’s just a prototype. It’s hard to say you’re hitting home runs every time when you’ve only made one. But it does have potential, and that’s exciting.”
Now, the tent will be featured at football’s highest level in the NFL. I’d say they’re hitting home runs.
Check out USA Today’s 2016 feature on the subject.
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