Baton Rouge, La.

No. 2 Louisiana State heads to Atlanta this Saturday as the favorite in the Southeastern Conference Championship. The Tigers’ rise is due in large part to its new-look offense, anchored by quarterback Joe Burrow’s devastating efficiency and an unstoppable run game.

But the Tigers’ success may also be partly owed to a technological advance in the weight-room arms race that has gripped college football in recent years. And it might not have happened if an unsolicited email last January from an unknown fitness startup founded by a trio of 20-something athletes-turned-entrepreneurs from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology slipped through the cracks.

LSU strength and conditioning coach Tommy Moffitt received the unusual email in January from Jacob Rothman, the chief executive and co-founder of a company called Perch. The fitness startup wanted LSU to test a device it created to collect data in the area of “velocity-based training,” a weightlifting technique in which coaches prescribe and measure how fast athletes move a weighted barbell in addition to total weight and repetitions. This kind of training increases power and explosiveness, key aspects of impeding defensive linemen and breaking tackles.

The Perch device works by pointing an XBox-Kinect-like camera on top of a weight rack and tracking an athlete’s movements, uploading data to the cloud in real time, and allowing coaches and trainers to see the results immediately on a tablet. Existing systems are clunky and error prone: wires with magnetic sensors attached to the barbells record data, but they are prone to falling off and tangling.