When potential #1 overall NFL draft pick Sam Darnold was training last summer, his coach Jordan Palmer noticed he’d developed an elongated throwing motion on longer passes and was wasting time and energy. Deploying a Wilson football with undetectable sensors, Palmer and Darnold evaluated alternative throwing motions for long passes and were able to come up with a quicker and more efficient pass that didn’t affect ball speed, launch angle or spin rate.
Darnold and Palmer were using the original Wilson X ball, which launched as a consumer device in 2016. It tracks basic data about ball speed, spin rate, spiral accuracy, distance, and whether the pass was caught or dropped by the receiver.