Ctrl+Alt+Elite: How VR is Hacking the NFL Quarterback Position
This past month, in May of 2025, it was revealed that the Tennessee Titans would be investing in a state of the art virtual reality training system for their recently drafted quarterback of the future Cam Ward. This is the same system used by NFL Rookie of the Year Jayden Daniels in his breakout 2024 season, proving that sometimes the best preparation for reality is avoiding it entirely. The method uses a VR football simulator to allow quarterbacks to run plays a thousand times over in a safe, controlled environment. The technology offers huge advantages for additional training beyond the practice field, and could potentially lead to a massive transformation of the league, even rivaling the Moneyball analytics revolution of the early 2000’s. Except instead of crunching numbers, we’re crunching pixels.
But how did we get here?
A Glitchy Beginning
It was 1992 when the dreadful piece of sci-fi shlock The Lawnmower Man stormed the movie screens of America and thrust “virtual reality” into the mainstream vocabulary. The ridiculous movie was loosely based on a Stephen King short story (King later sued to have his name removed from all marketing materials) and featured laughably bad computer graphics and an equally absurd premise. The movie was essentially Of Mice And Men mashed up with Frankenstein (because apparently that’s what passed for high concept in 1992!) and involved simpleton suburban lawn mower Jobe (Jeff Fahey doing a terrible Lennie impression) and mad scientist Dr. Angelo (Pierce Brosnan) who uses virtual reality goggles to turn the mentally disabled Jobe into a super genius “virtually” overnight. Jobe eventually became too powerful (cue the tiki torches and pitchforks) and yada yada, you get the point. But the idea that VR could be used to educate was born.
Fast forward to 1995, and the first widely released consumer VR headset hits store shelves with Nintendos release of the Virtual Boy, a single color “headset” that needed to rest on a desktop tripod the user had to lean forward to look into. Needless to say, after just a year, the not-ready-for-primetime device was scrapped due to causing chronic back pain, nausea and “permanent eye damage” among other highlights.
It would be 17 years until the next big step forward, when entrepreneur Palmer Lucky launched a Kickstarter campaign to build the first Oculus headset. The Oculus technology was so impressive, that just 2 years later, Facebook would buy the headset and later rename it the Meta Quest, now the most popular VR headset in the world.
Leveling Up
Over the next 10 years, VR and exercise/sports training would grow together exponentially. Wonky accessories like the old Nintendo Power Glove (so bad) would be replaced with controller attachments emulating golf clubs, boxing gloves, sword hilts and more. Hundreds of exercise-related games and accessories are now available, allowing users to get virtual workouts that actually make you sweat. Boxing games like Thrill of the Fight and Les Mills Body Combat allow you to train and dish out the pain, while not subjecting your body to the physical impact of real boxing. Users can hone hand-eye coordination and learn nuances of the game from literally anywhere, anytime.
But how well do these games actually “train” their users?
Devotees of the popular golf simulator Golf+ love that it allows them to play a round of 18 at dozens of famous golf courses around the world from the comfort of their homes, but will be quick to point out that the simulators haven’t significantly improved their real-life golf games all that much. Yet sports simulation has evolved differently across various sports.
Which brings us circuitously to the modern NFL’s recent adoption of virtual football trainers. Here’s where it gets interesting. Modern VR trainers as we know them actually owe much to the early flight simulators of the 1970’s and 80’s. Before Maverick was getting inverted or buzzing the tower, pilots were training in high tech virtual simulators. Developed as a means to give pilots repeated “reps” in a safe, controlled environment, flight simulators were the first virtual training devices.
German Engineering Meets Southern Football
In 2019, German entrepreneurs Verena Krakau and Christian Hartmann had a wild idea, and founded the VR company Cognilize to create a VR sports simulator for soccer training. That’s futball, not football. Yet in 2023, while visiting LSU in the United States, the pair had a meeting with athletic trainer Jack Marucci and rising star QB Jayden Daniels. Within months, they had adapted their virtual trainer for American Football and began working with Daniels to develop a comprehensive mental training program for Quarterbacks. The results? Daniels would go on to win the Heisman Trophy and have a record setting rookie year in the NFL. And he would attribute much of his success to the thousands of virtual reps he’d taken in his VR training simulator.
Now Cam Ward and the Titans are following his lead, using the same technology to essentially skirt the CBA rules that limit how much players can practice in the offseason, and giving Cam a leg up for when the season comes along. I won’t go into the specifics of how the system works. You can check out Easton Freeze’s article here for the details. But I do want to share a few thoughts I have on this incredibly badass technology.
The Need for (Virtual) Speed
One of the most talked about barriers to rookie success in the NFL is the increased speed of the game at the next level. To help rookies prepare for this, the VR trainer allows its users to gradually increase the speed of each play, from 0.5x speed to a rapid 1.75x speed. At the highest level, the QB sees the play developing significantly faster than it would be happening in real time, even at the NFL level, to better train their brains for the speed of the game. Jayden Daniels talked about how the game in real life appeared to slow down after running the plays in fast-forward on his VR headset. While it’s not going to look like the Matrix out there with everything moving in super slo-mo, even slowing things down a little can make a huge difference when a 250lb edge defender is running at you!
Tunnel Vision vs. Total Vision
Another concept that has been talked about is the ability of top QBs in the NFL to expand their peripheral vision and eliminate “tunnel vision.” In the context of football quarterbacks, tunnel vision typically refers to a quarterback only mentally seeing a narrow portion of what’s in front of them and an inability to see the entire field and all the options available to them. Like wearing mental horse blinders. Will Levis has been notorious for this.
Elite QBs see the whole field like they’ve got eyes in the back of their helmets. Expanding peripheral vision and the ability to see the whole field is critical for modern NFL quarterbacks, and vision training is common among QBs. Unfortunately, this is one of the most significant drawbacks of virtual reality. Top consumer headsets like the Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro have a horizontal field of vision of 100-110 degrees. Human vision, on the other hand, has a horizontal field of vision of about 210 degrees – basically, we can see from ear to ear. So, double what users see through a standard headset. Even the most advanced headset available – the massive Pimax 8KX – only reaches 170 degrees, which sounds impressive until you realize it’s still basically football tunnel vision with better graphics. Pictures of the headset that Jayden Daniels and Cam Ward have been using show it to be more akin to a standard headset with 100 degree FOV. So until wider headsets are available, this will be a limiting factor for this type of training.
The Next Position in Line
Another interesting thing to consider is moving beyond quarterbacks, the only position currently able to utilize this technology (sorry, kickers, your time will never come). To me, the other “green dot” player makes the most sense. “Green dot players” refers to the single offensive and defensive players wearing helmets with radios in them to communicate with the sideline and get the coach’s play calls. These helmets have a literal green dot on the back of them, and these players are responsible for getting the offense and defense in proper formation. Typically, the QB on offense and an inside linebacker on the defense. I can see a version of this built for inside linebackers in the future (and eventually safeties) to analyze plays pre-snap and practice their reactions. Being mentally prepared for the play and able to deduce what’s coming quickly could be a superpower for green dot linebackers and other defenders.
Looking to the Future
There are many other things to consider going forward.
The Paradox of Perfect Practice: VR training could actually create a generation of quarterbacks who are too prepared. Players who’ve seen every possible scenario in slow motion might struggle with the improvisation and chaos that makes great QBs legendary. Brett Favre never ran the same play twice in VR, yet somehow knew exactly what to do when everything went wrong.
The New Scouting Metric: NFL teams could soon be evaluating prospects not just on arm strength and accuracy, but on their “VR adaptation rate”. How quickly they can translate virtual reps into real performance. Draft boards might literally start including categories like “learns faster in 1.5x speed” or “retains VR muscle memory under pressure.”
The Backup QB Revolution: VR technology could fundamentally change the backup quarterback position. Instead of clipboard holders who get minimal reps, backups could take thousands of virtual snaps with the starting offense, making them genuinely game-ready. The days of “we’re screwed if our starter gets hurt” might be ending.
The Coach-Player Dynamic Shift: VR training data could create the first truly objective measure of whether a player is “coachable.” Coaches could know exactly how many reps it takes each QB to master a concept, potentially ending the era of players getting cut for being “slow learners” when they might just need more virtual reps.
From Lawnmower Man to Lombardi
We’ve come a long way from the Lawnmower Man, and while we’re not at Ready Player One levels yet, the future of VR tech is moving at a rapid pace, and I expect significant improvements in VR training over the next 5 years (if not sooner). The integration of VR into sports training will be a fascinating thing to watch.
From B-movie gimmick to quarterback training revolution, Pierce Brosnan’s mad scientist walked, so Cam Ward could run (a perfectly executed RPO).
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