While PowerPoint has won countless converts, many creators of the NFL’s most advanced offenses still swear by a different piece of the Microsoft Office suite.
Alongside the NFL Combine in Indianapolis this week, assistants are gathering 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 rather than route trees and counters. The sessions are led by the team behind Pro Quick Draw, a football-focused Visio (or PowerPoint) plug-in founded by a longtime NFL assistant.
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. The American Football Coaches Association represents roughly 10,000 members, about as many as the American Association of Geographers or the American Society of Plumbing Engineers. In a market that size, the sport’s greatest minds rely on consumer-grade software. At least for now.
Andy Bischoff was coaching high schoolers in 2001 when he first encountered Visio while visiting Notre Dame, a year after Microsoft began selling the software. In 2005, Robert Saleh brought Visio to Houston as a Texans intern, where he impressed coaches with his computer knowledge. A year later, Nathaniel Hackett earned plaudits in Tampa Bay by converting Jon Gruden’s 17,000-play playbook into Visio files; he’d previously worked the same wonders at Stanford. As Robert Klemko wrote in 2017, the digital revolution provided opportunities for a new generation of coaches—led by Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan—to shoot up the coaching ranks. Saleh is now the Titans’ head coach. Hackett runs the Cardinals offense.
The labor-intensive process of converting play calls into diagrams has also proven to be a fertile learning ground for the crop of coaches that have come up under them.
By the early 2010s, Bischoff had worked his way up to a position with the Chicago Bears. By then, Visio had become the norm.
“One night I came home in 2013 and my wife asked me the question, she said, ‘Why is it that technology is growing but the coach’s workflow stays the same?'” Bischoff said. “It was literally my wife’s question that was the origin of Pro Quick Draw.”
At first, Bischoff built the plug-in for himself, creating a collection of templates, integrations into other software and customization options. After joining the Ravens staff in 2015, however, 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.
Here’s what plays look like in a recent version of Microsoft Visio, with Pro Quick Draw elements available.
At one point, coaches using Visio even caught Microsoft’s attention. Seahawks offensive line coach John Benton said he and others met with representatives there to discuss potential feature updates.
Almost 25 years after Bischoff’s fateful ND visit, coaches are still using Visio, even if Pro Quick Draw encourages newcomers to pick up PowerPoint, given it now offers many of the same tools and likely promises more staying power. Much of the work is done in the off-season as playbooks come together. Throughout the year, tweaks are then implemented and new packages created. Certain assistants are also tasked with drawing up each opponents’ plays as part of weekly preparation. Today Visio costs $15/month, or roughly $300 for a permanent license. And when they’re not knee-deep in game planning, staffers can use the same app to redesign their kitchens.
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 new Raiders offensive coordinator Andrew Janocko, Seattle’s QB coach in 2025, it was his sister—a schoolteacher—who convinced him to use the tool.
Schooling backgrounds, it turns out, ran through this year’s Seahawks championship coaching staff. Tight ends coach Mack Brown, the son of two teachers (and a PowerPoint guy), majored in education in college. Run game specialist Justin Outten spent seven years teaching special education in Houston, learning how to get—and keep—students’ attention. In Seattle, he’s injected videos of himself breaking down concepts as a floating head on top of tape and diagrams to keep players like Kenneth Walker III engaged. Outten has also used Microsoft Copilot to generate mnemonics for athletes to remember their individual roles within certain play calls.
This season, Seahawks staffers had the benefit of a new tool, too, as sports (slowly) emerges as a proving ground for technology with broader applications.
Digital training platform Ethos allows coaches to upload their materials—including, yes, Visio integration—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 tech, Ethos CEO and co-founder Andrew Powell said, along with multiple branches of the U.S. military.
If the company can prove its value in those highly demanding, competitive fields, larger industrial and hospitality opportunities will follow, the thinking goes.
The Army itself saw an opportunity in football coaching software, launching GoArmy Edge in 2015 after partnering with the Indianapolis Colts. The free app converts 2D playcalls into the 3D visualizations as part of the armed forces’ athletics marketing effort.
The biggest tech firms, from Amazon to Google to Microsoft, are also using sports as a way to show how their artificial intelligence capabilities can improve evaluation and education.
“The pace of change and innovation within the NFL is truly remarkable,” Powell said. Individual tacticians scour hours of film to find minute flaws in an opponents’ scheme, tinker with their play designs to exploit those imperfections, and then drill an entire team to execute their vision within a matter of days.
“It’s almost like an extremely high-profile agile software team, where you’re identifying new bugs that you’re trying to change and fix and ship new things,” he said. “Every single day you’re making significant improvements and change—and that pace of change is a lot faster than a once-every-two-years annual refresher training.”
Clear outcomes and intense scrutiny create a pressure cooker for new ideas, as well as the need to disseminate them efficiently. Win or change. Over and over again.
Except when it comes to software. If the program works, coaches will seemingly hold onto it forever.