OPPOSING COACH'S OBSERVATIONAL COGNITION AND KNOWLEDGE SIMULATOR Greetings, User. You are Butch Jones, Special Assistant to the Head Coach. Please make a selection to render the highest probable outcome and next decision node. -------------------------------------------------------------------- The University of Tennessee is a Tier 1 research university with resources from around the world, deep relationships with many federal partners, and a world class faculty. This project was created in conjunction with none of these. In the Spring of 2010, new head football coach [ddiapos] initiated a program to build an advanced analytics digital model of opposing coaches based on all in-game decisions made to that point in their career. The goal was to be able to predict the choices of the opposing sideline in near real time. In the early stages, the budget was extremely limited. The project was competing with other initiatives such as ergonomically designed "no tip" garbage cans, foot traffic heat mapping within the athletics facilities to maximize the efficient placement of receptacles, and of course enforcing strict shower discipline both within the facility and in the residences of all players and staff. Thus, much of the equipment needed was cobbled together from the discarded piles of hardware stacked on the bottom floor of the Science and Engineering Research Facility (SERF) outside of the chemical disposal office. This decision was made in part because Coach Dooley identified the equipment chronically deposited there to be creating a fire hazard, and wished to increase the efficiency of the science and engineering facilities. Coach Dooley referred to the engineering and computer science students working on the project as his "serfs," after the building acronym, which eventually ended up also eating into the project's budget after a lawsuit related to this. A prototype version of a device meeting the project's goals was completed by the early Fall of 2010. This device was known as the Coach's Observational Cognition and Knowledge Simulator, or "COCKS." Coach Dooley was obsessed with the COCKS, and tried to use it to inform all of his game planning. But, in a twist of fate, COCKS sucked. While the system was able to accurately model decisions of many opponents, it often lagged far behind the "real-time" speed necessary to make useful adjustments from its outputs. In the Spring of 2011, a notable exception was uncovered while training the simulator for the following year's opponents: the head coach of the Cincinnati Bearcats, Lyle Jones. The in-game decisions of Coach Jones could be accurately modeled within seconds of the input variables being known. It was almost like COCKS was Jones, and Jones was COCKS. Coach Dooley was able to use the simulator to great effect against Cincinnati, but never again was a coach so aligned with the matrices and algorithms of COCKS' thinking. With the departure of Coach Dooley in late 2012, the budget of the simulator was cut and the rooms of formally discarded and obsolete computers went unattended for a period of time. While the exact circumstances of when, what, and how this occurred is unclear, sometime in the Spring of 2015 Coach Jones learned of the machine and his unique status within the project's simulation catalog. And what he did next not even the research and resources of a Tier 1 university could predict: he began using the simulation of himself to guide his own decisions. Using COCKS for extra brain power, Jones managed to win several games under improbable and often illogical circumstances before ultimately crashing and burning with the worst single season record in school history. During this time of relying on COCKS-thinking, Jones had enhanced the amount and number of types of data available to the simulator from himself, and had all aspects of the project redirected to focus solely on him, rather than on coaches and college football in general. All email, phone calls, phone GPS, and news media involving him were automatically fed into the simulator to be processed, and enhance the sophistication and fidelity of the outputs. COCKS no longer just predicted Jones' decisions: it also simulated the resolution of them. Coach Jones is long gone, but the machine powering the simulation is still running. And still receiving data.
