How many yards does a player cover in practice?

But although he's a staunch advocate for the GPS systems now, Viloria was hardly an easy convert. After 15 years training football players, Viloria knew how to coach athletes without spreadsheets, and letting math nerds behind the curtain of the jock culture was anathema to the old guard.

"I didn't want to tell a coach that's been doing something for 30 years that he's wrong," Viloria said. "I didn't want to find out that what I'd been doing was wrong."

As it turned out, the GPS devices had the opposite effect. The data didn't uncover any stunning secrets but instead gave Viloria the evidence he needed to better deploy plans he already had embraced. Each day after practice, players drop their monitors off to be downloaded. Jacobs and Malhotra sift through the output and filter out the most significant numbers -- max speeds, total distance, player workload, high-impact change of direction and myriad other measurables -- creating reports that illustrate the physical cost of that day's practice.

Those numbers are passed along to Viloria, who translates the information to Fisher, who then lays out his expectations for the next day's practice. Together, Viloria and Fisher create a detailed plan for each period of each practice using the metrics they've established through years of data collection. For the always-demanding head coach, that often means scaling back what he asks from his players.

"It's against a lot of the thinking you do as a coach," Fisher said. "But the results talk to you as if it's a doctor."

Two years ago, Fisher was troubled by an obvious gap between Greene's routinely impressive practice performances and the receiver's inconsistent numbers on game days. He wanted answers, so he pressed his conditioning staff. It turned out the problem wasn't with Greene. It was with the practices. Greene was Florida State's most refined receiver, so when Fisher would grow agitated with poor routes or dropped balls by other players, he would ask Greene to illustrate the proper form. Again and again, Greene would run a route or catch a pass, and his workload mounted. The GPS device offered clear-cut data that showed Greene was simply doing too much.

Fisher responded by lightening Greene's reps on Wednesdays and Thursdays to ensure a productive Saturday. "My legs were with me in every game last year," said Greene, who set career highs with 76 catches, 1,128 yards and nine touchdowns in 2013.