THE CANADIAN PRESS
Kevin Glenn likes hearing voices in his head when he’s on the football field. He only wishes he could talk to them.
The Hamilton Tiger-Cats veteran has become a huge fan of the CFL’s decision to equip quarterbacks’ helmets with special headsets this season that allow coaches to communicate directly with them between plays.
“It has helped a lot being able to communicate with the coach without having to come to the sidelines,” Glenn said. “It’s made getting the play and to the line of scrimmage a lot quicker.
“I think it’s great because it shows the league is trying to move into a new age. It’s actually pretty cool. I like it.”
Glenn’s only complaint is being unable to talk directly to the coach, if only to avoid unnecessary repetition.
“Sometimes you get to where they’re repeating things and they’re doing it for your benefit in case you’re not hearing it,” Glenn said. “But if you do, you continue hearing it over and over again and I won’t say it’s annoying but when you’re trying to talk to teammates and you’re hearing things in your ears at the same time it doesn’t work very well.”
This season, the CFL installed units into the helmets of all three quarterbacks with only one being active at a given time. The device is turned on once a team gains possession and goes off when there are 10 seconds remaining on the play clock. The signal isn’t switched back on until the play has been whistled dead by the officials.
Glenn and many other CFL quarterbacks are fans of the new technology because it’s direct and saves time. That’s important considering Glenn has 20 seconds to get his teammates into the huddle, get the play, call it, get to the line of scrimmage and quickly scan the defence before snapping the ball.
“It definitely allows you to get up to the line of scrimmage a lot faster,” said Saskatchewan quarterback Darian Durant. “That’s the main thing, to be able to kind of have a good idea what the defence is doing without having to rush getting all the signals from the sidelines.
“It definitely has helped.”
Edmonton’s Ricky Ray agrees.
“I’ve really enjoyed it,” he said. “We’ve had to use (hand) signals since I’ve been here and it just eliminates that.
“It’s a lot nicer just to hear it straight from the coach’s mouth. The other thing that’s a little bit of an advantage is he can give you a few reminders, a few tips after he’s done giving the play so it’s been really good.”
Durant, like Glenn, would also like the communication to be two-way.
“Sometimes as a quarterback you’re into the flow of the game, you kind of have a good idea of what will work in a certain situation,” he said. “You would like to give your advice to the (offensive co-ordinator) instead of having to wait until a drive is over and when you come to the sidelines.”
But Ray wonders just how much two-way communication could take place on the field.
“Usually they’re relaying the play to you, then you have to relay it to your guys and then you’re trying to get up there to snap the ball,” he said. “In the CFL there’s not much time to do all that.
“It would be an advantage but I don’t know how much you’d get to use it.”
The technology is hardly new. NFL coaches have been communicating directly with their quarterbacks via helmet headsets since 1994. However, Toronto’s Cleo Lemon, who used the headsets during his eight seasons in the NFL, says there’s a big difference between how the two leagues use the technology.
“In the NFL . . . you had a middle guy, a go-between, whereas here I’m talking directly to the guy who’s upstairs and shoots the play right down and tells me everything he’s seeing,” Lemon said. “That’s very helpful and is one of those things that allows us to make everything a little simpler in terms of getting in and out of the huddle, reducing time and allowing us to do a lot of things with our different personnel.”
Lemon is in his first CFL season and says the helmet headset has helped his transition to Canadian football.
“I always wondered what were guys doing before,” Lemon said. “So much information is being passed along through the headsets that I know it would’ve been difficult without it.
“I could see it being, especially with this being my first year in this system and league, a major obstacle I would’ve had to overcome. When you’re fighting that (20-second) clock it makes the tempo that much faster and you can’t have mixed signals because one bad miscommunication could lead to a big play for the opposing team.”
But the introduction of headsets has presented some challenges.
“In training camp sometimes it wouldn’t necessarily click on but that was fixed rather quickly,” Glenn said. “Since we’ve been playing games — and it’s probably everybody’s problem — when you’re on the road and the home crowd gets very loud it’s hard to hear.
“That’s why you still have to be able to signal from the sidelines sometimes.”
Saskatchewan Roughriders head coach Ken Miller is another headset supporter but, like Glenn, says the technology isn’t perfect.
“In a no-huddle situation it’s a bit awkward to get used to because before when you went into your two-minute offence the quarterback just called plays based on what he had on his wristband or his mind,” Miller said. “Now you have a combination of things.
“There’s communication possible with the quarterback at times when there hasn’t been in the past and where you might not expect there to be and that’s something we’ve had to adjust to.”
And once during the season, Miller and the Riders had to do without their headsets briefly.
“One of the big things was in each stadium the person who operated and got the thing turned on at an appropriate time, there was some inconsistency there,” Miller said. “We’d be ready to call plays but the system wouldn’t be on.
“You’d have to wait and it would get late so I think for everybody, not just coaches and quarterbacks but the people who have the on-off switch, everybody it’s taken a bit of practice to smooth it out.”
However, Miller says there are times when having the headsets can be too much of a good thing.
“I believe it’s possible in this situation to give the quarterback too much information like the safety is in location A or the middle linebacker is doing this,” Miller said. “Quarterbacks don’t have time to process that stuff because they have so much already that they’re responsible for.”
Currently, only the on-field quarterback has a working headset but Glenn and Miller would like to see the units added to a defensive player’s headgear so a defensive co-ordinator could communicate with him on the field.
“Certainly, I would be in favour of that,” Miller said. “Why would you not have the same capabilities to do that?
Durant would also support the move — kind of.
“I think that would definitely help the defence out but, of course, as an offensive player you don’t want that,” he said with a chuckle.
Glenn doesn’t believe the helmet technology gives the offence an advantage over the defence.
“I don’t think so because the defence isn’t on a time schedule,” Glenn said. “They’re already out there milling around anyway and can actually talk to their coach before the play so I don’t think its necessarily an advantage.”
