TBC, I don’t watch or care anything about the sport. I am curious why it hasn’t gone to full military tech style communications between players and augmented heads up display style interfaces. It certainly isn’t due to a lack of money. It is like the ultimate battle tech. What could possibly be more American than mock battles over an inflated pig carcass with military tech shit? Like drone view of every player, in helmet view, isolated coms, and off site real time strategy. Sounds about as potentially popular as a consul or first citizen hosting naval battles in a coliseum IMO.
Radio tech is used already. But the NFL limits who can use it during games. Iirc, it’s one player on offense, and one on defense, plus the coaches. You wouldn’t really want every player having coms. It would just be a confusing mess during a game; you really don’t want your receiver hearing an offensive lineman grunting while they’re supposed to be focused on catching a ball. Radios were originally banned, and it took a decade or so for the NFL to allow them.
Everyone already knows their job, they know the play, and they’re pro players because they have the ability to make good decisions on the field when a deviation from a called play is needed. So all you need is coms between someone on the sidelines with an outside perspective and the job of crafting the overall strategy and whoever is coordinating the team on the field. And that’s true of every team sport.
As a player, you really don’t want to deal with the distraction of a voice in your ear while you’re trying to execute. It’s distracting enough with non radio shouting during play.
As far as AR goes, it wouldn’t be as useful as you’d think. It’s still down to what you actually need and want to have in your senses while in play. And that’s going to be very little. You don’t want an overhead view because that splits your focus. Multitasking always comes with a decrease in effectiveness for each individual task, humans just have limits to what our brains can do.
Even a backwards view in the corner of your eye is of limited use on average because you need your field of view clear to detect movement in your peripheral vision. It might be a benefit when on offense and running the ball, but it wouldn’t work for every player, and you’d have enough that would be reduced in their abilities that it wouldn’t be worth it.
I really can’t think of any sport where ar would be useful where it wouldn’t also defeat the purpose of doing it. Like, archery or shooting where the ar would tell you exactly when your aim is ideal. At that point, you aren’t doing anything except pulling the trigger or drawing the bow. There’s no fun in that, no point in even doing it. Individual sports, you might benefit from coms with your coach, but having done some of those at an amateur level, radio wouldn’t be any better than just having them yell. Combat sports, the only way they would be useful is in grappling, and you don’t want anything physically in your ear when grappling at all. The risk of injury is too high. Ears already take a beating in combat sports.
The kind of coordination you need in the military, it just isn’t beneficial in football, no matter which of the football versions that are played at a level where the gear would not be prohibitively expensive. You might see some benefit in rec leagues where the players aren’t paid to practice the way pros are, but it would be way too expensive at that level.