Sam Darnold used smart football's data to learn key lesson on throwing motion

Lorenzo Reyes | USA TODAY

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Sam Darnold had a windup problem.

The summer after his redshirt freshman season, the USC quarterback was already talked about as the future cornerstone of an NFL franchise. But a recurring issue continued to pop up when he reviewed his film. On deep throws or passes in which he needed to drive the ball, he instinctively dropped the ball below his waist, wound up and catapulted it in a clunky, sweeping motion.

So Darnold and his private coach, Jordan Palmer of QB Summit, tried an experiment. They bought a commercially available Wilson X Connected smart football that uses a sensor to track completed passes, velocity, spin rate, spiral efficiency, and distance, all of which it uploads through an app to a smartphone in real time.

Darnold uncorked deep passes to stationary receivers 32 yards away with his elongated motion. Then tried it with a more compact form. The results surprised them.

“We actually found it that I was basically throwing the same ball, whether I was elongating my motion or not,” Darnold told USA TODAY Sports. “It was all mental. I felt that I needed to drop the ball to get that extra power. But seeing those numbers, what they actually meant, and tying that into what was actually happening with my mechanics – it was psychological for me to know that I just needed to keep my release compact and keep it as efficient as possible and know that I’m not losing any juice from that.

“You can’t argue with raw data. That doesn’t lie.”

In particular, Palmer honed in on three of the data points: spin, through rotations per minute; spiral efficiency, which looks at the tightness of the spiral; and velocity.

“We were able to definitely say, ‘Sam, lowering it is not going to make it any better,’ ” Palmer said. “ ‘All you’re doing is slowing your motion down.’ ”

The focus then turned to drilling Darnold into establishing a tighter throwing motion, especially on deep passes and ones that required more velocity. Palmer helped Darnold re-evaluate how he was using his hips and his feet to generate more power, while fighting off the urge to drop the ball in his windup.

“You’re taking the old motion and its muscle memory, and replacing it with the new muscle memory,” Palmer said.

Darnold, who played baseball in high school and also golfs, compared the tightening of his throwing motion to becoming more efficient in the swinging windups from those other sports.

He said it took a couple of weeks for the training to pay off and for Palmer and him to notice his motion becoming more compact.

Wilson tested a new prototype of the X Connected footballs last Thursday with Darnold in San Clemente, Calif., and is working on expanding the capabilities and data measured by the ball, including higher range sensors to capture higher velocities, more accurate data collection, and an importing system to sync with a film bank. The plan is to market it to high school, college, and NFL teams.

“I think everybody is going to be talking about this for the future of quarterbacking,” Palmer said. “Anybody around the quarterback position is going to be talking about these data points. This data is relevant if you’re 12 and trying to throw a spiral for the first time, or if you’re trying to be the No. 1 pick in the draft.”

Follow Lorenzo Reyes on Twitter @LorenzoGReyes.