Ask anyone what moment from the 2015 College Football Playoff national championship game sticks out to them and they would likely say the onside kick that swung the momentum in Alabama's favor. It was surprising, gutsy and so incredibly perfect.

But present the same question to the principal figures attached to the Crimson Tide's medical and training staffs and they'll all give a different answer. They'll mention the 95-yard kickoff return by Kenyan Drake that pushed Alabama's lead into the double digits during the fourth quarter of a 45-40 victory over Clemson. To them, it was validating, gratifying and inspiring.

In a span of 14 seconds -- the time it took Drake to catch the ball, begin his run, make a hard cut to his left, outrace the coverage to the far sideline, jet upfield and eventually dive across the goal line -- Alabama team physician Norman Waldrop and his colleagues had witnessed technology's impact on college football's most prominent football program.

As Drake was making his mad dash to the end zone, a small 3.8-inch device housed in the back of the running back's shoulder pads captured him sprinting at a top-end speed of 22.05 miles per hour. Drake had never run that fast, not even before the gruesome left-ankle injury he suffered against Ole Miss in October 2014. In fact, no Tide player had reached that velocity in the previous two years.

How did Alabama know this? That same instrument attached to the shell under his jersey had logged a treasure trove of info from all the games and practices he and his teammates had participated in the last 22 months.

Developed by Catapult Sports, an Australian company launched in 2006, these beeper-sized accessories use a GPS system and Russian space-based satellites to measure player workload, acceleration, deceleration, directional changes and explosive movements.

The intelligence gathered by the tiny monitors has helped Alabama structure practices, expedite the rehabilitation of injured players and manage extended 15-game seasons since the advent of the College Football Playoff three years ago.

"It just provides us with a tremendous amount of data that helps us make performance decisions," head football athletic trainer Jeff Allen said. "It even helps us to make some medical decisions. It's a tremendous asset for us."

Alabama is one of 55 American universities that have partnered with Catapult. But in quick fashion the Crimson Tide has become a leader with the technology by harnessing its power to advance the treatment of players who have been hurt and also prevent injuries from ever surfacing.

Alabama began working with Catapult in the spring of 2014 -- only months after Jimbo Fisher, a Nick Saban acolyte, lent credibility to its product by using the system and then steering Florida State to a national championship. The Seminoles were one of the first football teams -- college or pro -- to go all in on Catapult, which provides a service that has an annual price point reported in the five- to six-figure range.

It seemed a leap of faith on Fisher's part to make such a major investment in a company that was born on the other side of the world and had close ties to another football -- the Australian Rules version. Yet after he noticed a dramatic reduction in soft-tissue injuries, he became a true believer.

Alabama's staff would soon join him but not before exhibiting some skepticism.

***

When the Tide first began using Catapult during maniacal strength and conditioning coach Scott Cochran's grueling "Fourth Quarter" program, Allen and sidekick Clay Keith were overwhelmed by the information that these pocket-sized gadgets were spitting out each day. Catapult's S5 device processes a thousand data points per second and tracks hundreds of variables with a complex algorithm, gyroscope, accelerometers and magnetometers.

But the coaches simply wanted to know how much the players were exerting themselves. They already had an idea, of course, but coveted the empirical evidence that would confirm their suspicions. Then the results came back. The data showed, according to Keith's assessment, the top performer was a big offensive lineman everyone on staff knew was anything but a workout warrior.

"They were ready to throw the whole thing in the trash at that point," Keith, Alabama's 28-year-old athletic performance analyst, said with a smile.

Undeterred, both he and Allen aimed to master Catapult. For Keith, understanding how the system worked became the focus of his job. It was something he never expected. A former student manager with the Tide who served in that role through the 2011 season, Keith graduated with a finance and math stats degree.

He loved football but figured if he were ever to follow his passion he would have to do it as a coach. Then, Catapult came along. That summer, Keith and Allen holed up in the Mal Moore Athletic Facility with the goal of finding out the best applications for this technology. Months later, they solicited outside help.

Enter Jamie Hepner, a senior applied sports scientist from Australia. Hepner joined Catapult in March 2015 and was assigned to work with Alabama. Previously, he had a stint at the Australian Football League and had a background in strength and conditioning. He also spent time at the Australian Institute of Sport, where the idea for Catapult was born in the early aughts.

More than 8,000 miles away from the United States mainland, Hepner became a fan of the NFL and had studied up on American football to familiarize himself with a sport in which he is now involved every day.

"With teams like Alabama, I'm not going in and suggesting method changes to the program," said Hepner, who makes multiple trips to Tuscaloosa every year. "We have a lot of data it spits out and the interpretation of it is certainly my role with Alabama. I will spend time with the guys and look over the data they have collected. My whole career is making sense of that stuff."

Eventually, the Tide figured out a game plan for Catapult. For each player, the training staff would evaluate five components: The total distance covered, maximum velocity, explosiveness in each direction, yards run over 12 miles per hour and overall workload.

Using these metrics, Allen and Keith developed an accurate picture of a player's stamina and health in the context of practices and games, which helped Alabama's medical staff take preemptive measures to safeguard against soft-tissue injuries such as muscle pulls.

Over time, they knew baselines and standards would be established. And, in turn, a data profile would develop for each individual with the gradual accrual of information, giving the coaches the wherewithal to make sound, logical decisions that would keep the team in optimal condition.

The beauty of Catapult, as Keith and Allen have come to find, is its efficiency and its specificity. The wearable monitor can capture the exact period in practice when a player's energy level drops or peaks, allowing Keith to spot trends. And sometimes he can draw those conclusions from the sideline of the practice field, where Keith will post up with a laptop and radio real-time info to Allen and a player going through rehabilitation exercises.

"These guys are elite athletes and they're extremely competitive and they want to perform every day," Allen said. "And with us it is nice to know with the system when they're not at their best. We can take that and do what we have to do to make better. It really has validated what we see with our eyes."

Alabama now has 44 shoulder-pad devices that are used by the starters and immediate backups on both offense and defense. Keith collects them after each practice and game, downloading their findings onto a computer 20 to 30 minutes after the last whistle. He then exports the data into a pre-formatted Excel document that lists the result of the players and is broken down by position group.

On the volume metrics, such as player load and odometer number, he looks to see if anyone was overworked. On the performance measurements, such as explosiveness, he tries to decipher whether fatigue caused a decline. If an individual's numbers are one standard deviation outside of the norm, his entry will be highlighted with yellow. When Saban gets the report the next day, he can decide how to proceed as he determines whether to scale back repetitions for one of his starters or key reserves.

"You've got to respect that Coach Saban is a genius in his own right and he's got the process down to the way he wants to practice his guys and what they need to perform well," Keith said. "That's the crux of this whole system. They've got to get reps and they've got to get coaching to know what they are doing. But you don't want to work them too hard. It's about making that balance."

That's particularly true at Alabama, which has played 30 games the last two seasons and endured the grind that has accompanied its participation in the College Football Playoff each year since the format's inception. Catapult has helped the Crimson Tide navigate the long break that precedes the semifinal and then make the quicker turnaround for the championship game.

"You want to be at your best late in the year," Allen said. "Obviously, as we all know, a long season takes a toll on these players physically and mentally. So, this system really allows us late in the year to do the right thing with our players and it has changed how we practiced late in the year...It also helps me and helps our team physicians."

Waldrop, who specializes in foot and ankle surgery, can attest to that. He believes Catapult could revolutionize his field of medicine. He's given lectures touting the GPS-tracking devices and how they have helped Alabama speed up the rehabilitation process for players.

"I think this has the potential to be a real game-changer in the orthopedic world as we look to help athletes -- not only to keep them safe but also get them back on the field," Waldrop said.

***

Before Catapult came along, assessing an athlete's fitness level was tantamount to guesswork. Coaches would use their eyes to identify whether a player was tired and worn out, according to Allen.

"It was very subjective," he said.

The accepted norms that had been established for injury-recovery timetables were also speculative.

For years, it was believed that a high-ankle sprain would sideline a player six to eight weeks. Waldrop said these prescribed schedules were born out of "a little bit of dogma" and not much hard evidence.

He once bought into them, too. But then Alabama began using Catapult and his perspective changed. With the data supplied by Catapult, Waldrop and Allen could see how the player was performing physically before the injury and whether he was making progress toward full recovery in the aftermath of it.

The data was so specific that Waldrop actually gleaned definitive clues showing that someone who hurt a lower extremity was healthier on one side versus the other. This came from Catapult's inertia movement analysis, which quantifies the degree of a player's activity in three-dimensional space from forward to back, left to right and even up and down.

Suddenly, Waldrop and Allen had the ability to assess if an injured starter or reserve was making his cuts with the same force in one direction as he was in the other. No longer would they have to rely on the feedback of a player telling them he was feeling 80 or 90 percent. The numbers produced by Catapult would reveal the truth -- with the benchmarks established before he was hurt being used as a basis of comparison.

It's why Waldrop felt confident enough to clear former offensive lineman Dominick Jackson two weeks after he had surgery to repair an ankle that he had badly sprained in October 2015.

"He felt good, his exam looked good and his numbers said he is accelerating well and he's pushing off both legs equally and his speed was fine," Waldrop said. "We have numbers that say it was OK to do that and it's hard to argue that when you have objective numbers."

Waldrop earned a measure of satisfaction when Jackson was able to return to form as quickly as he did. But the case of Kenyan Drake is seen as perhaps the greatest victory achieved by Alabama's medical and training staffs.

The journey that led Drake from the dreaded loss to Ole Miss on Oct. 4, 2014 to the magnificent moment he would realize in a championship victory Jan. 11, 2016 is quite extraordinary. Against the Rebels, Drake's left foot was pointed outwards after he'd been tackled in the second quarter. He had broken his ankle in horrific fashion, leaving him devastated and in severe pain. Months of rehabilitation would follow that was guided by the Catapult system.

Allen realized, "I can look at how explosive he is, how fast he is and how we are getting him back to where he was before. Just being able to see him return to normal and know this system was really helping us to make those decisions to know when he was ready to progress in rehab I knew this is a great system."

Waldrop also came to that conclusion. He studied Drake during his recovery process, collaborating with Allen to tailor the running back's workload as he responded to the different drills and exercises he was given. Waldrop was fascinated by what he was seeing, thinking about the applications of the Catapult system and saying to himself, "Why don't we do this for everybody?"

"It was amazing to watch as Kenyan got stronger and faster, how over the months he became normal," he said.

But nothing was more astonishing than Drake's 95-yard kickoff return and how it unfolded, with the senior running back setting his own personal performance record.

"That was his max speed at Alabama," Waldrop said.

Yet as Drake was making his way to the end zone, Waldrop was unaware the fleet-footed specialist was running faster than he ever had before. The orthopedist was too busy cheering him on, as he excitedly jumped up and down with his arms outstretched. Look closely at the Sports Illustrated cover with a still image of Drake's highlight and it's easy to spot Waldrop in mid-air.

Only after the game would Waldrop, Allen and the rest of their team learn of the startling information supplied by Catapult -- the makers of a little device that has had an enormous impact on Alabama's top-flight program.