Man behind the system: Jack Marucci opens Colin Hurley's eyes to the future

To LSU, Colin Hurley was never just a regular recruit. The Tigers saw much more than just the physical talent on the field. Staff members and coaches admired the knowledge he carried at a young age.

At 16 years old, he enrolled at LSU. He put himself in a quarterback room that just saw the departure of a Heisman Trophy winner, and although not seen as the incumbent signal caller for 2024, he's taken all steps necessary to prepare himself for the test.

Hurley reclassified in November 2022, joining a 2024 class lacking a quarterback commit. Since, he's taken multiple trips to Baton Rouge and put his eyes behind the mask that elevated the play of Jayden Daniels in his career-best season.

Cognilize is now no hidden secret to college football. The German company designed an artificial intelligence as an off-the-field avenue of development that LSU quarterbacks used in 2023.

It increased their cognitive growth in a virtual reality system that included the Tigers' offensive playbook, opposing team's defensive schemes and backdrops of road stadiums to find a feel for different environments.

Hurley talked at length regarding its developmental advancements the last two months, but the man behind the push at LSU put Hurley through the system on visits this past season.

Jack Marucci, the Tigers' director of performance and innovation, has already left his mark on LSU — and the baseball world — but his newest project caught the attention of Hurley.

"His dad's done a great job with him as far as educating him to these different technologies and not to be afraid to look at different avenues of learning how to play the position," Marucci said.

Physical talent can sometimes seduce evaluators. Speed, arm strength and size all play a part in success, but when you break down what leads to completions, correct decisions, etc., it comes down to cognitive processing.

Marucci was always interested in how he could objectify that a little better. Working with S2 Cognition in 2015, Marucci learned new ways of monitoring cognitive growth. Pieces to the puzzle were laid out then, incorporating traits, characteristics and demographics into a system to define a quarterback.

LSU put tracking chips into footballs, identifying spin rates, wobble rates, velocities on short throws and apexes on long, explosive throws. It created a GPS for the quarterback, bringing together data that showed a player his metrics.

But where Marucci wanted to look was even further: how could he make a quarterback more prepared for a game?

"Can you move the needle on some things?" Marucci said. "Sometimes our DNA is what we are, and there's been some things that can and maybe improve some of this. But look, we've invested in a lot, and I think that this tool was something that we envisioned several years ago. We were just trying to find the right people to do it."

Cognilize came to Marucci last year with what LSU desired. The artificial intelligence, ran through a virtual reality system, has the Tigers' offensive playbook imported into it. It has motion captures of every movement and formation, mimicking exactly what LSU would run in a game.

The system is able to simulate defenses. Immersed in a virtual environment, the quarterback is able to prime his brain for the upcoming opponent, seeing exactly what a team will run based on data and film.

Before a Saturday game, Marucci and the quarterbacks ran through 70-80% of the call sheet Wednesday, adding more of the plays Thursday and Friday. The sessions wouldn't take longer than 35 minutes each day.

Marucci had until Wednesday each week to get the turnover of plays from the opponent's previous game. Installing 28-30 plays from the prior Saturday, Marucci and performance innovation and analytics assistant Mario Macaluso would call the plays from an iPad.

"This database just kept getting bigger because you're seeing different looks," Marucci said. "As you know, college football gets more sophisticated as we go, and we probably had 800-900 plays of our plays in there. And when I say that, there's variations of the same play."

The beauty of the system, in the eyes of Marucci, is how the Tigers can use it during the offseason. Cognilize wasn't up and running for LSU until the week of the Mississippi State game, the third contest of the season.

With it now available for a whole spring and summer before games this fall, it offers underclassmen like Hurley an edge in development, especially at such a young age in relation to his peers.

"When recruits come in, it's important, too, that we have the ability to show that this is this is a real piece of development," Marucci said. "This isn't something we're talking about, we don't have it right or we're going to get it."

It took months to build out the call sheets in the system, but now with half a year to prepare rather than days or weeks last fall, quarterbacks are in a more relaxed position to grow at their own pace in Cognilize.

"These are mental reps, not physically, you're getting now," Marucci said. "You can do a drop back if you choose to. You can go through the motions, but you don't have to. You're allowing the brain to get recognition of what they're going to see."

For Daniels, he didn't have months of preparation in the system, so Marucci incrementally sped it up week-by-week. Priming Daniels' brain for what he'd see in a game, Marucci finished out the season at about 70% faster than what Daniels saw on the field.

"He got so programmed that it didn't even faze him," Marucci said. "I remember we bumped it down accidentally, and he goes, 'what is that?' 'Well, that's normal speed.'

"It looks like it was really almost slow motion to him because he was so used to seeing things happen so quick that he was able to read that."

Marucci praised LSU staff members for being very willing to integrate this type of development into their coaching styles. He believes a program needs forward-thinking coaches to embrace this type of technology as a tool to improve the product of the offense.

"I think when young kids see this and it's something that's tangible, then obviously you had benefits," Marucci said. "Again there's other factors why our quarterback did well in the Heisman, but he felt like this was a big tool that that put him over the top.

"Now he worked hard, he studied extra and great coaching. All that is compounded, all this is a total program."

Marucci plans to build out the system for multiple position groups as well. Using a PICO Virtual Reality headset, there's so much volume that needs to be imported given the data for multiple positions.

The headset isn't a fisheye lens, meaning players have to look around to see the motion of receivers or shifts of linebackers and defensive backs. It allows a quarterback to learn how to anticipate responses from a defense.

In order to invest in a player, the player has to be willing to learn it. The Tigers' staff can't force anyone to use the system if he doesn't want to, but before Hurley even enrolled, he wanted to get behind the lens of Cognilize.

He wanted to see how Daniels developed in a Heisman season. Marucci saw this maturity Hurley carried on those visits. He saw the willingness Hurley had in taking advantage of those tools while not even enrolled at LSU yet.

"For Colin Hurley, this is going to be a pretty powerful tool," Marucci said. "Because it's going to immerse him right into the offense where he can do it anytime he wants, basically throughout the day if he wants to if he chooses to do it."

The intention was to never impress prospects or use the vehicle for development in recruiting, but down the line, Marucci doesn't think it's out of the realm of possibility that more is used to access to future talent.

"You're regulated on some things that you can do," Marucci said. "But that may be something to definitely look into to see some of these young kids."

For now, Marucci doesn't see it as a tool for recruiting, leaving the evaluations up to coaches and film, but he sees it as a step forward in what LSU wanted to accomplish at the collegiate level.

Other companies attempted to accomplish what Cognilize did, but there wasn't another football program that made the strides in advancement that LSU did in 2023. Cognilize became a part of the curriculum for LSU quarterbacks. It gives them a head start on the season, taking non-physical reps.

To Marucci, Hurley was different. When he talked to him, he didn't think he was just 16 years old. His curiosity beyond what Marucci opened his eyes to furthered his readiness to reclassify and get his feet wet early in college football.

To LSU coaches, Hurley has the build, character, processing and intangibles to be an efficient quarterback in the SEC.

"They had things in place that allowed him already to be thinking as a collegiate quarterback," Marucci said. "We feel very fortunate having a young player coming in like that."

Studying college athletes for 20 years at LSU, Marucci learned to separate the talent and look at traits that correlated to success. He's worked with three Heisman winners in his career, and the level at which Hurley is processing the game right now has drawn comparisons in terms of character.

"Our highest character players here, they have succeeded here and in the NFL, who signed the second contracts are guys with that," Marucci said. "I think he also has these traits of being able to process at a high level. ... I would hedge the bets that he will have success when he gets a chance."

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