Culture
How Falcons' helmet cams are honing play calling, cadence and dad jokes
FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. — Terry Fontenot was playing hooky from an Atlanta Falcons OTA workout day in Cooperstown, N.Y., in June when he got a surprise in his hotel room. The Falcons’ general manager spent the day watching his son, Kaiden, play in the Cooperstown All-Star Village baseball tournament. That night, he sat down with his computer to review film of the Falcons’ on-field session he had missed back home.
“I’m watching practice, and you’ve got the different views, the sideline, the end zone, then a higher end zone view and another view right down the line of scrimmage,” Fontenot explained. “So I’m clicking through the views, and all of a sudden I hear something. I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ Then all of a sudden I’m in the huddle.”
Fontenot was hearing and then seeing the footage from cameras the Falcons have attached to the helmets of quarterbacks Kirk Cousins and Michael Penix Jr. for practice sessions this offseason.
“I knew we had talked about the possibility, but all of a sudden it’s just in our regular film,” Fontenot said.
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Atlanta’s coaching staff has gained valuable insight from the footage, coach Raheem Morris said. In exchange, the coaches have had to hear an array of playful complaints from the players.
“I joke with them that it’s kind of like the KGB: ‘You guys listen to everything I say,’” Cousins said. “The huddle used to be my time, but now you guys are in there and the huddle is bugged. I tell my teammates, ‘You guys are not getting let off the hook.’ If you say, ‘What’s the play here?’ the whole building knows. It’s probably more like a spy technique than anything else, but feedback is feedback, and it’s one more tool.”
Smooth with it @themikepenix 🎯 @cwash82 pic.twitter.com/1Ouc3C1PtV
— Atlanta Falcons (@AtlantaFalcons) August 14, 2024
Penix, a rookie, said he has benefited from being able to hear how Cousins, a 13-year veteran, calls plays and manages the huddle and snap cadence, but he hates the sound of his own voice.
“I feel like my voice sounds different in person, but other than that, I like the view,” he said. “It’s a cool thing.”
Matthew Bergeron, a 6-foot-5, 323-pound offensive lineman, doesn’t have to worry about hearing his voice in the huddle, but he’s not sure the camera provides him the most flattering angle.
“I think it made me look weird when I watched film,” he said. “I looked a lot bigger than I thought I looked. It’s not my best angle, but it’s a good angle to watch film.”
Penix also doesn’t think the camera gives him proper credit for his canniness.
“Sometimes on the GoPro, you can’t really see what I’m reading,” the quarterback said. “Nine times out of 10, I am looking off a defender. So, my GoPro might be facing this way, but really I’m reading over there.”
(The “GoPro” camera isn’t actually a GoPro. It’s a DJI Action 2 model.)
The Falcons coaching staff tries to determine where the quarterbacks are looking with the footage, and thus how they are reading the defense and going through their passing progressions, but the most valuable aspect is the sound, first-year offensive coordinator Zac Robinson said.
“The biggest tool is hearing the communication and how the guys are getting in and out of the huddle,” Robinson said. “I know it’s big for Mike as a young guy just learning the process of what it’s supposed to sound like.”
When Fontenot heard the helmet camera suggestion, he assumed the idea started with Robinson, who followed Morris from the Los Angeles Rams’ coaching staff. Actually, the man behind the cameras is Jake Stroot, the Falcons’ fourth-year video director.
Stroot got the idea when he saw the Miami Dolphins using the cameras during joint practice sessions in Miami in 2023. He pitched them to the Falcons coaching staff, and Morris liked the idea.
“You can see exactly what the quarterbacks are looking at when they are barking through cadences,” Morris said. “You are grading your coaches there, too. You can see the flow between Zac Robinson and Kirk.”
The cameras hold 30 minutes of footage each, and Stroot’s staff has four for each quarterback, which they swap using magnetic holders multiple times each practice session. The cameras run throughout the team’s 11-on-11 practice work.
“We tried it out in the spring, and they liked it, and it has grown from there,” Stroot said. “The audio part is really special just to hear the cadence and stuff. All the guys are really digging it.”
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Watching the helmet camera footage and cutting it into clips for the coaching staff is “the most enjoyable part of my day,” Stroot said.
“The passion that Kirk shows is still very much there, and that’s very evident from hearing him talk,” Stroot said.
The helmet cameras have added four hours of footage for Stroot and his staff to work through every day. The video staff already was recording practice with nine aerial cameras and six ground cameras each day, accumulating nearly 20 hours of footage from each practice, all of which is cut into clips and made available to the coaching staff within 30 minutes of the end of practice.
The Falcons also have added sideline video screens during practice that show the previous play immediately so players and coaches can get quick reviews between snaps. Putting them in place and operating them also fell to Stroot.
“That’s just the mindset of him and his whole department,” Fontenot said. “If there’s a new person in the video department, the first thing he says is, ‘Our mantra is “no” doesn’t exist. We don’t say no.’ Somebody comes down and they ask for something, the first answer is yes and they figure it out.”
The Falcons hired Stroot away from the University of Georgia in 2021 after asking Bulldogs coach Kirby Smart for permission to talk to him.
“We interview him, it goes well, and when I called Kirby to tell him we were hiring him, there was an expletive,” Fontenot said. “He said, ‘I’m so happy for him, but man this is a tough loss.’ As soon as Jake is in the building, you see why.”
The Falcons and Dolphins are believed to be the only NFL teams currently using helmet cameras, and Stroot says no other professional teams have approached him for advice on implementation, though several colleges have.
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Defensive coordinator Jimmy Lake thought the cameras were a tool of the Falcons’ social media team when he saw them pop up on the practice field.
“But then Rah showed it in the team meeting, and it was really cool,” Lake said. “Got me thinking, ‘Maybe I want to put one of those on Jessie Bates so we can flip it the other way as a teaching tool.’ I think it’s genius.”
Bates said he might start reviewing the footage to see how he looks from a quarterback’s eyes.
“It’s cool to see,” the safety said. “Rah pulls it up in the team meeting room sometimes, and to see how Kirk processes things and how excited he gets to this day is cool. He talks a little s— as well. I need to start getting some footage of that, for sure.”
In addition to reviewing his performance for each play, Cousins uses the film to self-scout his wealth of “dad joke” comedy material.
“I get a better feel for how I come across,” the 36-year-old quarterback said. “I’ll say a joke I thought was pretty funny, and then I’ll go back and listen to it and say, ‘Don’t say that.’ I’ll watch it and think, ‘I thought I was cool, but I’m a nerd.’”
(Photo of Kirk Cousins: Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
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