Tackling Injuries With AI: The NFL's Jeff Miller

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
How does one major sporting league use AI to minimize player injuries? Find out on today's episode.

**Jeff Miller** (0:10)
I'm Jeff Miller from the National Football League, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:17)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy Guest Editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:35)
I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, Senior Partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017 Interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:03)
Hey, everyone. I'm kicking things off today with a discussion with Jeff Miller, Executive Vice President of Communication, Public Affairs and Policy at the National Football League. Shervin, what do you think about that? Kicking off things? Did you catch that? Pretty good, huh? I do these things for you, Shervin. You have to appreciate that.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:19)
How long did it take you to write that?

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:20)
Oh, it was about half an hour. Anyway, Jeff is also responsible for player health and safety, and we'll learn a little bit today about how that relates to AI. Jeff, it's great to have you with us. Thanks for joining us.

**Jeff Miller** (1:31)
Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:34)
So for those of us in the US., we're hearing this episode just before the Super Bowl this weekend. We're eager to learn how the capabilities of artificial intelligence have changed the game of football. But first, maybe let's start more basic. Can you tell us, Jeff, about your role and how you came to focus on player health and safety?

**Jeff Miller** (1:53)
Sure. Happy to. I've been at the NFL now for about 15 years, and I think I've had about 15 jobs. During the course of that time, each one evolving on the last, I started working in Washington, DC., coming off of Capitol Hill. One of the primary topics that the government was interested in during my tenure in Washington on behalf of the NFL was health and safety issues, long-term effects of concussion, what the league was doing to intervene, what the league was doing with retired players, what the league was doing with any number of different sorts of injuries. And so with that as a primary topic, we ended up building out a portfolio with partners and others around health and safety and looked for a handful of different strategies to affect the safety of the sport. And since I was involved on the policy level at that point in Washington, it became my portfolio. And over time, that portfolio grew and changed and became more innovative and sophisticated with a number of great people to help do that work. My job also began to evolve as I began to communicate around the health and safety of the sport and then eventually added the communications portfolio and some other odds and ends to my work. So that's 15 years and 15 seconds.

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:03)
That's great. So tell us what kinds of initiatives you're working on. I think details would be fun here.

**Jeff Miller** (3:09)
On the health and safety side, the primary thesis of our work is try to find ways to reduce injuries.
Seems pretty simple. NFL football, football at all levels, is a contact sport. And unfortunately, one of the effects of that is the possibility of injury, which is true in all sports. But of course, in football, tackling and blocking can lead to injurious behavior. So can high-speed running and the amount of demands that we put on the human body. And so work that began several years ago around trying to reduce concussions, specifically, has morphed into innovative strategies to try to reduce any sort of injury. So everything that you can think of, from hamstring strains, which bedevil our players in greater numbers than any other injury, to shoulder strains, to high ankle sprains. All of those have component parts of them and strategies against them, where we rely upon experts in the spaces, researchers, biomechanical engineers, to help us understand how the human body works, innovators to come up with advanced ideas around equipment. And of course, trainers and doctors to try to intervene. And should an injury occur, we have players to get them back sooner. We share research, we publish research, we work with first class institutions around the world and try to share our learnings. In as transparent a way as we can, because in any one of those spaces, any injury saved is a benefit to the game. And more importantly, any injury saved in bulk by creating better equipment, changing the rules of the game, have a huge benefit to a player in the short term and his long term health.