Every football staff in the country has AI somewhere on the summer list. For some, it is a line item. For others, it is just a nagging feeling that everyone else is figuring this out faster. Thad Wells, who stepped away from coaching to build systems for football programs full-time, calls the profession an industry of arms races, FOMO, and uncertaintly right now. He is not wrong, and the programs moving on it this summer are right to move.

‍

I am not here to talk anyone out of it. We have been using AI in our daily work for about three years, and the more the rest of the industry leans in, the more convinced I am that it belongs in a football building. The question is no longer whether AI shows up on your staff. It is what you do with what it gives you.

‍

Start with what AI is actually good at, because Thad has spent more time on this than anyone I know. He is not building something that calls your plays or makes your football decisions for you. He is building the layer underneath all of that. Feed it your scouting notes on Sunday, and it drafts the scout report, the question pack for your coordinators, and the one-pager for your players in your own terminology. Monday, it helps build the practice script and the staff checklist. It writes the first version of your booster note, your recruiting message, and your meeting agenda. Over time, it becomes the program's memory, the second brain that holds what no single coach has the hours to hold.

‍

Thad says it plainly. Most football guys do not have the time to learn AI, and few AI guys know football. He is closing that gap, and he is right that this is not optional for much longer. In his words, it is not just software you buy. It is a skill, like reading, writing, math, or typing, and somebody in your building is going to have to learn it. The worst thing you can do is wait until the season is over to start.

‍

Here is where it gets interesting, and it is the point Thad makes at the end of every school visit. Say AI takes two, three, or four hours a week off your plate. He walks coaches through it like a chalk talk. What wins games is talent and keeping that talent. Keeping talent comes down to relationships. Relationships come down to knowing your players and actually talking to them. So if AI buys back the hours, the next question is the only one that matters. Who do you spend them on?

‍

That is the whole thing. The best thing AI gives a coach is time, and the job is spending it on the right kid.

‍

But there is a catch, and it is the part nobody selling you a tool will mention. AI does not only give time back. It also adds output. More reports, more dashboards, more dense and well-organized information than any staff has ever had in front of it. More output is not the same as more clarity. The coach who wins the next ten years is not the one with the most AI. It is the one who can still find the signal in all of it.

‍

I sat with a head coach last week, a guy whose program has been to the mountaintop more than once. He told me he worries about exactly two things. Practicing and playing football, and training to practice and play football. Everything around the edges, in his view, pulls his staff away from those two things, and he was not wrong to be protective. His program takes in GPS data every day, roughly a dozen metrics per session that generate 6 to 7 million data points. At that volume, like most programs, his staff was reading maybe five to six of them. Nobody was sure where the real concern was hiding.

‍

What turned the conversation was simple. The thing I showed him was not more data. It was less. His athletes would tell us how they are doing every day, on their own, and we hand that back to the staff in real time in a way every coach can read without anybody translating it. We will have 105 conversations a day, I told him, and then point you to the 5 or 6 players you actually need to talk to. That is signal cutting through noise. That is finding the one kid who is not okay before it shows up in a hamstring, or in a portal entry you never saw coming.

‍

This is why Thad and I keep landing in the same place from opposite ends of the building. He is organizing the chaos and handing coaches their hours back. The piece I care about is what happens with those hours, and the only way to spend them well is to know where to look. The signal that tells you who needs you is the one thing no model can generate, because it does not come from the AI. It comes from the athlete.

‍

One side gives you the time. The other tells you where to spend it. Put them together and you have the thing every coach has always been chasing. More time with the right people, and a better idea of who those people are on any given day.

‍

So get the AI. The programs waiting around are going to spend next year catching up. Just do the next thing right, and remember what the hours are actually for.

‍

AI can clear your plate. It cannot tell you who needs you today.

‍