College football teams and the Green Bay Packers use a 6-foot tall white robotic machine called “The Seeker” to simulate a player punting and passing.
The Boston Globe
We were getting down to the final cuts at Freedonia State, and I was pretty sure I was going to make the team. The Snot Otters are reigning champions of the Division III Mid-South-Central-Eastern League, but there were gaping holes left by last year’s graduating class; place-kick holder, on-side kick specialist, “Fumble Rooski” lineman, and Statue of Liberty quarterback. My strategy, a football variation of “Wee Willie” Keeler’s policy to “hit ’em where they ain’t,” was to go for the capillary, not the jugular. I would be the most special of special team members, a crescent wrench that’s not much good until you need it, but when you do, nothing else would do. Whatever skills nobody else had wasted time on perfecting would be the ones I’d have mastered.
The coaches had made the painful cuts that got the roster down to 149 players, so there was one spot left. I wasn’t the kind of guy who was going to hang around as equipment manager or water boy if I got cut. No, I wanted the prestige and babe-magnetism of being a real, live college football player. In the words of the song my mom and dad used to sing to me from the time they hung my Green Bay Packers mobile over my crib, “You’ve got to be a football hero to get along with the beautiful girls.” That’s what I wanted–just to get along with girls and, uh, maybe a little something more.
I was practicing my dropkicks–hey, Doug Flutie brought it back in 2006 after a 65-year interregnum–when I noticed this new guy walking onto the field. At six feet tall he was slightly-above-average height for a D-III player, and he was all in white like Billy “White Shoes” Johnson on steroids.
“is this where football tryouts are held?” he asked in a bland monotone. Maybe he was a foreign student looking to kick field goals because of his soccer background.
“Yeah, although this is the last day. Did you check in with the coaches?”
“they have downloaded my software yes.”
Guy wasn’t too talkative. Maybe too much blunt trauma to the head in high school. I looked at his shiny white cranium and didn’t detect any dents, though.
“What position are you trying out for?”
“i can do anything.” Bad news for me.
“Well, uh, the defense is pretty much set. They need people on special teams.”
“punter i can punt.”
“Okay, go talk to Coach Foster over there.”
The thing moved over to where our crusty old special teams coach, McGuire Foster, was trying out kicking prospects. In Division III you get a lot of guys who won their local Punt, Pass & Kick competition and think that’s their ticket to stardom. Foster was shaking his head as he watched the feeble efforts of guys who couldn’t kick their way out of a Dick’s Sporting Goods store, much less punt from an end zone with four oncoming rushers trying to block their kick.
“excuse me coach i am a punter,” the robot said to Foster.
“What’s your name?”
“the seeker.”
“That’s it?”
“right.”
“Weird name. You sure you don’t want to try out for the XFL, like that guy ‘He Hate Me‘?”
“no my mom and dad are alums they worked in computer science lab back in the sixties teaching COBOL.”
“Okay, let’s see what you can do.”
The Seeker dropped back ten, took a long snap–and sent a high end-over-end kick down the field where it bounced on the twenty and slowly rolled to a stop at the one-yard line.
“Pretty good,” the coach said. “Can you do it again?”
“sure watch this,” The Seeker said, then proceeded to blast two, three, four, five, six, seven–you get the idea–perfect punts down the field.
“How about coffin corner kicks, can you do those?”
“right or left side?”
“Your choice,” the coach said, and The Seeker proceeded to drop one on each side of the field.
Things were looking pretty grim for me, so I decided to shift to situational passer–you know, the special a la carte throws like shovel pass, alley oop, and so on. I ambled up to quarterback coach Skip Reese and asked if he was interested in seeing my bag of tricks.
“Give it your best shot,” he said without much encouragement. I lined up in the shotgun formation, took the snap, and fired a “West Coast”-type short pass to Todd Zliegskwirki, our massive tight end, on a crossing pattern. Todd, who is so handy in college level wood shop and basket-weaving classes, dropped it like slippery quart of Gatorade.
“Okay, who else we got?” Reese asked, obviously not impressed.
“passer i am also,” The Seeker said. Don’t know if he was trying to display Yoda-like wisdom with his convoluted throw-your-mother-off-the-train-a-kiss syntax, but Reese gave him the ball and said “Let ‘er rip.”
The Seeker went into classic straight drop-back mode and fired off a rapid series of bullets that Zliegskwirki and the other receivers hauled in like picking loaves of bread off a grocery store shelf. Easy-peasy, as the vogue saying goes these days. It wasn’t looking good for me.
“You’ve got quite an arm,” Reese said as he clapped The Seeker on the back, producing a loud “ping” sound when his wedding ring hit the bot’s metal body. “And you’re built solid. Is there anything about your history we should know?”
“well there is the little matter of compensation.”
“Young man–er, thing–this is Division III. We don’t give scholarships.”
“the annual cost of my hardware, software and servicing is between forty and fifty thousand dollars a year.”
“That’s rank professionalism!” I screamed in a last-ditch effort to make the team.
“entitled i am to name-image-likeness revenues,” The Seeker said.
“But he’s never played a down of football,” I said. “Nobody’s going to pay him until he produces.”
Coach Reese looked off into the distance. “Maybe one of the boosters could get you a do-nothing job,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Like database management, or spreadsheet software.”