Linda Park

NFL Coaches Use a $15 App. Everyone's Embarrassed. I'm Not.

February 22, 2026

A Sportico story dropped this week that apparently shocked people, and I genuinely don't understand why. The headline: NFL's $20M Coaching Staffs Still Build Playbooks With $15 Apps. The implication being that this is somehow scandalous. That the richest sports league in the world, whose top coaches earn more in a year than most of us will see in several lifetimes, has failed in some fundamental way by letting its staff use Microsoft Visio to draw up plays.

I read it twice. I'm still not embarrassed on the NFL's behalf. I'm a little annoyed on behalf of everyone who's treating tool choice as a proxy for organizational sophistication, because that's a bad habit that costs companies real money.

Here's What Actually Happened

Alongside the NFL Combine in Indianapolis, coaching assistants gathered in conference rooms to swap tips and tricks they've learned over untold hours in Microsoft Visio - a chartmaking tool designed to build computer networking diagrams or floor plans, not route trees and counters. The sessions were led by the team behind Pro Quick Draw, a football-focused Visio and PowerPoint plug-in founded by a longtime NFL assistant.

Visio costs $15 a month, or roughly $300 for a permanent license. And when coaches aren't knee-deep in game planning, staffers can use the same app to redesign their kitchens. That last part is what everyone's quoting. The kitchen redesign line. It's good. I laughed. But it's being used to make an argument I don't buy.

Professional football is a massive business. Top coaches earn $20 million a year. In a majority of states, the highest paid public employee leads a college program. And yet, parts of the industry still feel small-time.

That framing - $20 million coach, $15 app - is meant to feel like a gotcha. It reads to me like someone who has never actually run operations for anything.

The Tool Isn't the Problem. The Assumption Is.

The story behind Pro Quick Draw is actually worth paying attention to, because it tells you something true about how good software gets built and adopted. One night in 2013, a coach came home and his wife asked him, "Why is it that technology is growing but the coach's workflow stays the same?" It was literally his wife's question that became the origin of Pro Quick Draw. He built a plug-in for himself. Templates, integrations, formatting shortcuts - all sitting on top of software his colleagues already had installed.

After joining the Ravens staff in 2015, his peers wanted in. "An idea that was meant to improve my own workflow has led to 30 of the 32 NFL teams being Pro Quick Draw teams," he said, as well as thousands of high school and college programs.

That's not a management failure. That's organic adoption. That's what good tooling looks like when it spreads through an organization on merit rather than a mandate from a VP who read about it in a newsletter. I have watched expensive enterprise software get purchased, deployed, and abandoned inside of eight months because nobody asked the people who actually do the work what they needed. Thirty of thirty-two NFL teams are using this thing. That's a 94% adoption rate. Name me a SaaS rollout that's hit 94%.

Gerald has been in project management for years and he still uses Excel for half his tracking. Not because his company can't afford something better - they can - but because Excel does exactly what he needs it to do and he doesn't have to file a ticket with IT when the pivot table breaks. There's a version of the Sportico story that could be written about Gerald. It would be equally unfair.

The Actual Tension in This Story

Here's what's genuinely interesting, and what the "$15 app" framing flattens: there's a real gap between the NFL's official technology investment and the day-to-day workflow of the people doing the actual thinking.

On the official side, the league has spent significantly. The NFL's Sideline Viewing System for every club has been upgraded with more than 2,500 Microsoft Surface Copilot+ PCs to empower 32 clubs, roughly 1,800 players, and more than 1,000 coaches and club football staff with real-time game data and analysis tools. Coaches and players have access to a new feature built with GitHub Copilot to filter plays based on criteria such as down and distance, scoring plays, and penalties to quickly analyze formations, decipher coverages and make more data-driven decisions.

Microsoft first appeared on sidelines in 2014 after the tech giant inked a big sponsorship deal with the NFL worth a reported $400 million. Four hundred million dollars. And coaches are also using a $15 app. Both of these things are true at the same time, and neither one cancels the other out.

The real story here is about the difference between what organizations buy and what people actually use. That gap is everywhere. It's not unique to football. I've watched companies spend serious money on business intelligence platforms while half the sales team runs their actual pipeline tracking in a shared Google Sheet they've been updating since 2019. The sheet works. The BI platform has seventeen dashboards and nobody knows what the blue line means.

A new generation of coaches has added more technology to their teaching stacks as they face players raised on cell phones and video games. Online quiz platform Kahoot! swept through the league as teams adjusted to virtual meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic. For one offensive coordinator, it was his sister - a schoolteacher - who convinced him to use the tool. A schoolteacher. The NFL didn't mandate Kahoot. They didn't pilot it or negotiate an enterprise license. A coach's sister said try this and it worked and now it's in the league.

That's not embarrassing. That's exactly how effective operational tools spread.

What the Criticism Is Really About

The "management failure" framing assumes that the correct response to having $20 million coaches is to ensure every part of their workflow uses software that costs proportionally more. This is not how anything works. It's the same logic that says you should negotiate a contract using a fountain pen because you're closing a big deal. The tool should match the task. Visio matches the task.

At the NFL Combine, assistants gathered to swap tips and tricks learned over untold hours in Microsoft Visio, a chartmaking tool designed to build computer networking diagrams or floor plans rather than route trees and counters. The sessions are led by the team behind Pro Quick Draw. Coaches are sharing workflow knowledge at a professional gathering. That's a functioning knowledge-transfer culture. I would love to see that at half the companies I've observed over the years.

Tory was telling me the other day - this was right after his car situation got resolved, or not resolved, I can never tell - that he read some article about how you can tell how well-run a company is by what tools they use. I told him that's backwards. You can tell how well-run a company is by whether the people in it can do their jobs without spending three hours a week managing software instead of doing the work. If the Visio setup is letting coaches draw plays efficiently and share them across 30 of 32 NFL teams, it's a well-run operation. The price tag is irrelevant.

In a market of roughly 10,000 football coaches, the sport's greatest minds rely on consumer-grade software. Yes. And consumer-grade software is often excellent because it's been tested by millions of people who have no patience for things that don't work. Enterprise software is sometimes excellent. It's also sometimes a $200,000 implementation that requires a dedicated admin and generates a report that nobody reads. I'm not picking sides on principle - I'm saying the correlation between price and usefulness is weaker than most people think.

The Part That's Actually Worth Worrying About

I'll give the critics one point, and only one. This season, Seahawks staffers had the benefit of a new tool called Ethos, a digital training platform that allows coaches to upload their materials and create personalized assessments that players can complete from their phones during downtime. Ethos then shows coaches which concepts certain athletes might not yet fully grasp. Seattle was among six NFL teams implementing the technology, along with multiple branches of the U.S. military.

That's the kind of tooling that's actually hard to replicate in Visio. The analysis layer - knowing which player hasn't internalized which concept - that's where purpose-built software earns its price. If teams are still cobbling together player comprehension tracking through informal conversations and guesswork while Ethos exists and works, that's a gap worth closing.

But that's a different argument from "coaches use Visio and that's embarrassing." That argument is about using the right tool for the right job. The Visio situation is coaches using a functional tool well, with a community around it, with documented adoption across nearly the entire league. That's not a failure state. That's a solution that worked.

I had this exact conversation with Chris last week. He'd been looking at whether we needed to upgrade one of our existing tools, genuinely trying to do the right thing. He pulled up a comparison, asked what I thought, had clearly spent time on it. I told him the existing setup was doing the job and a migration would cost us more in disruption than the new tool would save us in features. He nodded but I could tell part of him wanted the new thing anyway. There's something seductive about newer and more expensive. It feels like a decision, like progress. Staying with what works just feels like inertia even when it isn't.

That impulse - the one that says spending more on software signals better management - is the actual management failure here. Not using Visio.

What Businesses Should Take From This

The NFL story is interesting precisely because it involves an industry where the stakes are extremely high, the talent is world-class, and the competitive pressure is relentless. If that industry's practitioners converged on a $15 tool and built a professional ecosystem around it, the answer isn't to replace the tool. The answer is to understand why it works and whether you're creating similar conditions in your own organization.

Are your people sharing workflow knowledge the way NFL assistants share Visio tips at the Combine? Do you have the equivalent of Pro Quick Draw - someone who noticed a gap, built something, and watched it spread because it was genuinely good? Or are you buying enterprise solutions and wondering why adoption is low?

I made Gerald's chicken and rice casserole for the team last Tuesday and brought it in. Derek ate three servings and didn't say a word about the Star Wars sequel he'd been going on about all morning. Sometimes the thing that works is just the thing that works. The price is beside the point.

The NFL coaches aren't failing. They're using a tool that fits, that their community has built around, that has spread to 30 of 32 teams without a mandate. If your organization can point to one piece of software with that kind of organic adoption, you're ahead of most companies I've seen - regardless of what it costs per month.

The story isn't embarrassing. The reaction to it is.