Texas football coaches spend hours developing game plans every week. Now they have a new voice available at their meetings: a chatbot.
They type questions into their computer and ask an artificial intelligence about tendencies. How often does an opponent blitz on third-and-5 or shorter? Which receiver do they target on third down? Are they more likely to run or pass on third-and-short? Google's Gemini sifts through cloud-stored data, examines it, and provides its findings.
It's a prototype. Soon, it will do much more.
Texas on Friday announced a new sports analytics and artificial intelligence hub on campus called the Bevo Lab, a 25,000-square-foot space inside Austin's Innovation Tower. Google Cloud, Dell Technologies and SHI International are the founding corporate partners for what they believe is the first-of-its-kind hub focused on sports analytics.
"It's not the boogeyman," Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte told CBS Sports. "Let's lean into this. Let's lean into analytics."
Texas says early work with Google Public Sector has saved its coaches more than 15 hours a week in game preparation this season. Kirk Goldsberry, executive director of the Business of Sports Institute at Texas, said the figure comes from the Longhorns' game-planning reports. Google engineers helped rebuild how those reports are produced, digging through what Goldsberry called "haystacks of data."
"They would come in Saturday night or Sunday morning and have their game planning reports ready for big meetings Sunday and Monday," Goldsberry said. "That was a giant pain in the rear end. We were able to streamline some of that."
Goldsberry made his name charting shots in the NBA for ESPN's Grantland, and later served as the San Antonio Spurs' vice president of strategic research and head analyst for Team USA Basketball. He also wrote the New York Times bestseller "SprawlBall."
"The biggest mystery here is why did it take so, so freaking long for this to happen at a university?" he said.
Goldsberry has hired 24 undergraduate students for Bevo Lab's first team, and they begin training with Google next week. Texas says the lab will involve up to 40 student researchers in its first year, scaling to 200 a year. Del Conte said the lab's construction should be finished in about three months. Goldsberry said it will be fully operational in 2027.
"I got undergrads who are dying to do it," Goldsberry said. "I got grad students who are already good at it. I got faculty who are teaching it. And then I got a lab full of athletes and teams and coaches that are desperate for it."
Texas uses a tool called Football Scouting Intelligence. It automates the opponent data and video reports that Sarkisian's staff used to compile by hand each week, Goldsberry said. The AI can also digest data from human movement tools developed by companies like Catapult, which track players' acceleration, deceleration, heart rate, and wear and tear. The lab plans to pull data into the system, starting with football.
Del Conte, who once picked up game tape at the bus station and spliced it for coaches, believes data will challenge play-calling habits in the near future.
You think your favorite play is the correct one to call in a certain situation? Well, Google Gemini might sort through the data and discover it's one of your least productive plays in that situation. "If it's someone's favorite play, you go, well, sir, that's the proof of the pudding," Del Conte said. "I don't think that's your favorite play anymore."
Football is part of the institute's longest-running projects with Texas athletics, but it has also helped scout players in the basketball transfer portal. Transfer AI grades players and projects how they would perform at Texas against an SEC schedule. Goldsberry said he brought in data scientists from his days with the Spurs to build models that rate roughly 5,000 men's and 5,000 women's college basketball players. Men's coach Sean Miller and women's coach Vic Schaefer use it, he said.
A football version generates scores for transfer targets at nearly every position group, according to the institute's website.
"I don't care if you're playing at Harvard, if you're playing at Michigan, if you're playing at Bowling Green, I've got you scouted," Goldsberry said.
The data also helps inform what Texas should pay players in revenue-sharing money. Goldsberry said finding the best player is no longer the whole problem; rather, "it's being the best player within our budget."
AI isn't new to football. NFL teams use Microsoft Copilot-powered tools in the coaching booth. In college, Arizona State's football program began using Intel AI-powered computers for recruiting and game preparation in 2025. Texas' pitch is scale: a university lab, Google engineers and student researchers building tools for 21 teams and more than 500 players.
The announcement Friday is big on ambition. Del Conte contends the Bevo Lab "will become the global benchmark for innovation in sports AI and data analytics." All 21 sports at the university will work with Bevo Lab.
Matt Renner, Google Cloud's president and chief revenue officer, is a Texas graduate who ran Microsoft's U.S. enterprise business before joining Google. The belief is other schools will want the same setup as Texas after it is fully up and running.
Google works with other universities, he said, but not at this level. "We're not leaning in like this," Renner said.
Del Conte said he hopes the model "spreads like wildfire" to other schools.
