The next frontiers of tech in football with Prime Vision's Sam Schwartzstein
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 2 July 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
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Summary
If you listen to a show like this, you already have an idea of how much modern technology is shaping the NFL. There's a decent chance, though, that its reach into what you watch on Sundays...and Mondays...and especially Thursdays is far greater than you suppose. And it's only increasing. Sam Schwartzstein, the analytics expert behind Amazon's Thursday night Prime Vision broadcasts, joins Robert Mays to discuss the future of football and where the marriage between tech and the sport is headed on this episode of The Athletic Football Show.
Hosts: Robert Mays and Derrik Klassen
With: Sam Schwartzstein
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Producer: Michael Beller
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mays. Doing something a little bit different |
| 0:07.7 | today. A couple years ago, my friend Sam Schwartzstein, who does a fantastic job on Thursday |
| 0:12.5 | night football and Prime, he's their analytics expert for Thursday nights. We talked about the state |
| 0:17.8 | of football analytics in 2023. And so much has changed with just technology |
| 0:23.9 | in general in those two years. Think about the phrase chat GPT and how ubiquitous that feels now |
| 0:31.1 | compared to a couple years ago. And the way that it feels like artificial intelligence is just |
| 0:35.2 | in the conversation in a way that it just wasn't |
| 0:37.9 | even that recently. So I wanted to revisit sort of a big picture idea with Sam that touches |
| 0:43.5 | on some analytical aspects, but takes it even a little bit broader than that. What we're going to do |
| 0:48.2 | today in an hour is try to figure out the future of football to an extent. We're going to bucket this in a bunch of |
| 0:55.0 | different ways. We talked about artificial intelligence and analytics. That's the majority of |
| 0:59.1 | this conversation. What is possible? What might be possible in the near future? How much are |
| 1:03.8 | teams already using AI and just where is this going to go? But I also wanted to talk to Sam about |
| 1:08.7 | some schematic tweaks that he thinks might be on the |
| 1:11.6 | horizon based on all of the research that he does. A couple of things with broadcasting and where |
| 1:16.5 | they might be able to take Thursday night football over the next couple of years based on some of the |
| 1:20.6 | things that are going to become available to them. And we also talked about because Sam loves this |
| 1:24.5 | stuff, a couple rule changes that he'd be interested in that he thinks might |
| 1:29.0 | help the league. So rules, analytics, schematics, and broadcasting. We spent the next hour talking |
| 1:36.4 | about the future of football with Sam Schwartzstein. I hope you guys enjoy it. |
| 1:46.0 | It's late June. It's summer in the NFL calendar, and this is the time of year where |
| 1:50.4 | we do stuff like this. |
... |
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