College Football
Boise St. goes high tech

By Chadd Cripe
The (Boise) Idaho Statesman

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BOISE, Idaho — Meet the newest member of the Boise State University football staff.

She played college soccer, earned a doctorate in biomedical engineering and wants to solve the problem of sports-related injuries.

Michelle Sabick, an assistant professor in Boise State's College of Engineering, created computer animation of the 23rd-ranked Broncos' six quarterbacks to help them improve their throwing techniques. For her, it was a side project for researchers studying knee injuries in women and shoulder injuries in sports.

"If it helps them win, we'll keep helping them," Sabick said. "If we get blamed, though ... "

The project utilized motion-capture technology common in animated films and video games. Sabick put marble-sized, reflective markers virtually all over the quarterbacks' bodies — including a headband — and asked them to throw passes across her lab, which is no larger than 30 feet by 20 feet. The football was marked, too.

Six infrared cameras recorded the movement of each marker and logged it into a computer as blue dots for the body and pink dots for the football. Graduate students then identified each marker (head, elbow, and so on) and began to turn the blue dots into a stick figure.

The computer added the rest.

The result is a football-throwing figure that can be viewed from any angle and can produce stats such as ball velocity and elbow extension. It also can be synced with video for split-screen viewing.

"It reminded me of EA Sports," redshirt freshman quarterback Taylor Tharp said, referring to the video-game company known for Madden NFL 2005 and other sports titles. "I thought it was kind of cool to be doing something like that."

The computer, even more than video, doesn't lie. It can place axis lines through hips and shoulders.
 
"We're always talking about level shoulders, level hips," Broncos quarterbacks coach Chris Petersen said. "You can really see this on one of our throwers that to me has that problem. It leads to inaccuracy. It's not something we didn't know, but it's something that totally validates what you're talking about."

He believes quarterbacks can benefit from the technology.

"There's a huge possibility here in terms of studying this and extracting some information you can use," Petersen said. "That's the trick with these types of things. They're very detailed ...

"The more we study this thing, the more we would be able to have some very usable information come out of this. It's so new to us, we haven't had a chance."