NFL's 1st & Future to Award $150,000 on Television Show

The NFL is bringing its awards for novel advancements in athletes’ safety and performance to television.

Next Tuesday night during Super Bowl week, the league will air its sixth annual “1st & Future” competition. The show is set for 8 p.m. EST on NFL Network. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, Arizona Cardinals receiver Larry Fitzgerald, and Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, which is collaborating with the league, will be on hand as $150,000 in prize money is handed out on the telecast.

Innovators and data scientists have been awarded a total of $750,000 for their winning pitches in past years.

“The 1st & Future program has grown substantially over the last few years as a direct result of the fact that we have been able to attract innovative ideas and actual products that have translated to the NFL field relatively quickly,” said JeffMiller, the league’s executive vice president of communications, public affairs, and policy.

Some real-world examples of 1st & Future winners’ impact:

— Mobile Virtual Player (MVP) is a company started by Dartmouth football coach Buddy Teevens that invented a robotic tackling dummy that reduces tackling in practice. Teevens believed “there was a better way to replicate the needs of the game if we can get something that simulates movement on a field, be fast enough, thick enough, heavy enough to strike, but not jeopardize the person making the tackle or the person being tackled. That’s how it started.”