Howdy and welcome to your Thursday FOIAball!
Yes, today is Friday. Only the second time in 14 months I’ve been late. I do apologize, but it’s not my fault. Blame the jerk whose dog attacked mine on our afternoon walk yesterday. A few unexpected hours at the vet messed with my routine.
Here’s a perc’d up pup pic as an apology.
(He did cover the bill, so I can’t even feign hardship and shame y’all into upgrading because of it. What a waste.)
Moving on, I have a podcast appearance to share! A super gratifying one. When I sent my first ever FOIA so many years ago, it went viral thanks to a huge boost from Jason Leopold, the Godfather of public records reporting.
Jason has FOIAed every agency and office under the sun, singlehandedly responsible for prying loose some of our nation’s most zealously guarded documents.
And he wanted to talk to me! I joined him on Bloomberg’s Disclosure podcast, where we swapped trade secrets, and I shared my truly awful writing playlists.
Give it a listen!
Today, I want to talk about football. Two teams, to be specific: Texas and Iowa.
Both are 5-2. They aren’t perfectly comparable, but there’s some similarities. Texas has played a much harder schedule, beating three ranked teams. That said, the Longhorns are averaging 30.7 points per game to Iowa’s 28. Texas has scored 26 touchdowns to the Hawkeyes’ 24. Iowa is outgaining them on the ground, 179 yards to 146.
Texas has been a slog this year, whereas Iowa has been a pleasant surprise. But if you thought this is a treatise about expectations wrought by Week Zero polls or how playoff implications shape our enjoyment of a regular season, you’re wrong!
It’s a story about AI.
Last Friday, the Austin American-Statesman revealed that Texas “used AI” on a critical play against Florida.
Down 20-17 in the fourth, facing a fourth-and-two, the Longhorns turned to “Bevo Lab,” their proprietary computer cow, to dial up something big. A QB draw. Arch Manning ran straight into a defensive lineman.
Sounding like every AI CEO who pitches its unlimited potential and ignores its embarrassing limitations, Texas AD Chris Del Conte said, “I’m fired up. I’m excited. This is earth-shattering.”
And just like AI companies abnegating responsibility for their bots’ myriad crimes, the school walked the claim back, saying computer cow did not, but merely could have, suggested a play.
Although the launch of computer cow was (extremely, very, hilariously) poorly timed, Texas is all in on artificial intelligence. Its athletic department is essentially building its own in-house data center to crunch numbers and find any edge. Since the school apparently cannot force Steve Sarkisian to give up playcalling duties, the only solution is to drain Barton Springs.
The announcement didn’t include a price tag. I’m gonna go with… expensive.
If that seems excessive, it is. Because the Iowa Hawkeyes have compiled basically the same stats and record by spending just a few hundred bucks on ChatGPT.
More than anything, we need to congratulate Kirk Ferentz for even allowing an LLM inside his building. That the sport’s second-oldest and longest-tenured coach would embrace a newfangled doohickey is frankly astounding. I bet he has the funniest name for it. Tells his assistants to ask ChadGBB or something.
I need to be annoyingly imprecise for one second. I know the Hawkeyes spent $312 on ChadGBB. I don’t know if that’s per month or per year. I will explain.
I noticed the charge in a monthly expense sheet from the school. After I saw it, I requested every university’s athletics department spending on Anthropic and OpenAI. Iowa has yet to get back to me. And frustratingly, that amount adds up to around what some schools spend monthly and what some spend annually. So it could be either. Apologies!
But that isn’t the only issue here. It isn’t easy to find out exactly how much teams are spending on AI.
Looking at payments to those two companies misses much of the artificial intelligence already embedded in football programs. Just like every app you once loved has been rendered clunky and incompetent (looking at you, Instagram search), sports software providers are AI-ifying their offerings.
As the excellent Matt Brown at Extra Points pointed out this week, longtime video and data providers like Catapult and Hudl have amped up their AI.
Public universities also have big contracts with Microsoft and Google for myriad services like email hosting and data management. Often included in those deals is employee access to Copilot or Gemini, usage that can’t be pegged to an athletics department. The same goes for school-wide deals with OpenAI or Anthropic.
(I was going to dive into Texas’ overall spending with those two next week, but the dang pesky kids at The Daily Texan scooped me last night! I won’t tell you how much UT spends with those two firms. Go read their story to find out!)
Those caveats aside, a few schools did provide me with records covering their football team’s spending with Anthropic and OpenAI. Aside from the amount, they don’t tell us much. Which is good. Frees us up to make some entirely baseless claims.
Before we do: FOIAball is and always will be made by humans! One human, to be precise. All these big scoops are from just me. I think that’s impressive. I hope you do, too.
And if you value real human effort, incisive reporting, creative writing, and really silly art, become a FOIAball subscriber today!
Kansas football has a $20 monthly subscription to Claude Pro. Kansas is 3-4. Waste of money. Virginia Tech spends the same amount each month on Claude, and they’re 6-2. Hey, I’ve overlooked far graver sins in exchange for a few wins.
Boise State spends a little more, $75 each month. Yes, they’re 6-1, but that record has a huge asterisk. They lost to Oregon. I read through all 93 pages of risk factors Anthropic listed in its recent SEC filing. Does that glaring product failure get mentioned? Not once. They’re telling you it can accidentally launch a nuke when it can’t outcoach Dan Lanning this season. Give Bret Bielema six trillion dollars.
Speaking of not getting any bang for your buck, Michigan State spends $3,700 annually with Anthropic. What is Pat Fitzgerald doing with all that compute? Not vibe coding good football, that’s for sure. The Spartans are 2-6. What would Claude even say to him?
“You’re absolutely right, Pat. Your players are conspiring against you.”
Texas Tech seems to have a similar subscription with Anthropic ($3,500 annually). They also spend $300 a year on ChatGPT. They’re good, so maybe that’s the secret. But they’re also maybe not that good. Perhaps too much AI is to blame.
What does it all mean? Absent actual proof of how this is all being used (working on that), same as anything. If everyone is using it, the differences, the marginal edges, they’re all negated. Literally a collective waste of money.
But I’m sure computer cow will put Texas over the edge.
Thanks for reading! Sorry for being late! Mandy’s fine! I’ll see you next week!
Hacker via Surasak Suwanmake / Getty; Bevo via Ed Lallo / Getty
