Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian speaks during a timeout against the Ohio State Buckeyes at Royal-Memorial Stadium in Austin on Sept. 12. The University of Texas’ Athletics Department is launching Bevo Lab, a new premiere sports intelligence platform to leverage artificial intelligence across the department. The platform will first rollout on the football team, where the platform’s AI can give coaches insight on game strategy, scouting, player development, recovery and more.
Chris Del Conte was buzzing as he geared up for a board meeting Thursday.
Texas’ athletic director was giddy, less than 18 hours before the department he leads was set to announce a major new initiative — one he says will change college athletics.
“This is the new wave,” Del Conte said in an exclusive interview.
In the fourth quarter of last week’s game against Florida at Royal-Memorial Stadium, the Longhorns put the new initiative to use.
Down 20-17 and facing a fourth-and-2, Texas needed a spark. So, coach Steve Sarkisian and his staff turned to their new artificial intelligence data analytics platform, Bevo Lab.
While the Longhorns ultimately failed to convert after quarterback Arch Manning lost three yards on the play, Del Conte said the moment was a pivotal embrace of the new tech.
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“It’s happening,” Del Conte said. “They’re bought in.”
College football coaches using AI isn’t new. But Texas isn’t turning to traditional chatbots.
Bevo Lab, which is being officially announced Friday, functions as the athletic departments’ personal AI sports intelligence platform. Coaches, trainers, nutritionists, student-athletes and analysts will use it to improve performance on the field, court and even pool.
Sponsored by Dell Technologies Inc., Google and SHI International, it is also a living, breathing classroom for undergraduate students to shape the future of AI in sports.
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“I have no doubt this will fundamentally change how college athletics programs look at data and utilize data,” Deputy Athletics Director Drew Martin said.
“Oh no doubt,” Del Conte said. “I’m fired up. I’m excited. This is earth-shattering.”
The evolution of ‘Moneyball’
In sports, there’s always been an abundance of data.
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Game strategy, injury recovery, training schedules, rosters and scouting all rely on that data for success.
The University of Texas’ Athletics Department is launching Bevo Lab, a new premiere sports intelligence platform to leverage artificial intelligence across the department, with the help of Round Rock-based Dell Technologies Inc., Google and SHI International. The platform will first rollout on the football team, where the platform’s AI can give coaches insight on game strategy, scouting, player development, recovery and more. The platform is a first for college athletics as teams across the country look for ways to harness the new technology.
Sports data analytics became a mainstream practice after Michael Lewis published “Moneyball” in 2003, the story about how the Oakland Athletics used data-driven analysis to assemble a successful baseball team on a micro budget. Since then, it’s become a common practice across sports, professional and otherwise.
And where there’s data, AI can be used.
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College coaches are already using AI in various ways. Streamlining workflows like any other industry, or in the case of LSU coach Lane Kiffin, reportedly asking OpenAI’s ChatGPT for legal advice. Nebraska football coach Matt Rhule is using AI agents created on Claude Code to give the Cornhuskers an edge.
Florida has launched an AI-powered Athletics initiative to investigate ways AI could reduce injury and “enhance athlete wellness.” USC hired a director of artificial intelligence and analytics for its football team this season.
But unlike chatbots or agents like Claude or ChatGPT, Bevo Lab will be used solely by UT and use UT data exclusively.
Bevo Lab’s “Bevo Lakehouse” will function as a unified data center to store sports-specific data. This data could be from game film, wearable technologies such as heart rate monitors and more.
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The lab has custom AI frameworks for every team, meaning Sarkisian and women’s basketball coach Vic Schaefer won’t have access to each other’s data or be asking queries in the same platform.
Texas women’s basketball head coach Vic Schaefer reviews his playbook during the NCAA Final Four game against UCLA at the Mortgage Matchup Center on April 3. While the Bevo Lab initiative is initially rolling out on the football team, it will inevitably bleed to all sports. The platforms will have individual frameworks built on each team’s data, meaning coaches from different sports won’t have access to each other’s data or be asking queries into the same platform.
The platform, Martin said, is already helping coaches save time.
The lab debuted with Longhorns football in last week’s game, according to Del Conte — and will later expand across all 21 varsity sports.
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“We have been siloed for so long,” he said. “We have a nutritionist department, we have sports science, we have mental health. How do we collectively put them in here?
“Just like McLaren improved by one second in F1, if we can improve them by three seconds, we would not lose to Oklahoma like a couple weeks ago.”
Inside the lab
When he returned to the classroom, Kirk Goldsberry helped found UT’s Business Sports Institute to unite McCombs School of Business students with real-world sports careers.
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Goldsberry is a pioneer in basketball analytics, serving as vice president for strategic research for the San Antonio Spurs and helping Team USA win gold at the 2016 Rio Olympics as the men’s team’s lead analyst.
But walking around UT, he said, he saw a unique opportunity to merge academia, sports and industry into one setting.
“Why don’t they have the biggest, baddest sports lab in the world on the Forty Acres?” he said. “When you look at our setting in Austin, when you look at this incredible university with one of the best STEM departments — the computer science department, our statistics department— all the human beings we have yearning to apply their stats knowledge to sports, why doesn’t this exist?”
Headquartered at UT’s Innovation Tower, Bevo Lab will function not only as a real-working AI data analyst platform but also as an active classroom for students. Goldsberry will serve as its director.
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Texas Longhorns pitcher Samuel Cozart (35) throws in the seventh inning as the Texas Longhorns play their first game of a three-game series against the Alabama Crimson Tide on April 17. Baseball was one of the first use cases to show the success of data analytics in professional sports, as explained in Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball.”
“At heart, I’m a professor who is hoping to find cool new ways to teach and learn on this campus in a time of great upheaval, and this is in part largely driven by concerns and opportunities that are hoisted upon us in higher ed,” Goldsberry said.
Bevo Lab’s inaugural team includes 24 “biggest, baddest, sports-loving” students who tried out in a hackathon, he said. The lab can support as many as 40 students annually, who will not only get the experience on their resumes, but also future job connections with Bevo Lab’s founding partners.
And it makes sense that the top founding partner for Bevo Lab was also created on the Forty Acres more than four decades ago.
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Dell Technologies, famously founded by Michael Dell from his dorm room at UT in 1984, is the official Technology Infrastructure sponsor of the lab. The company is providing the computing power necessary to run AI models.
“This is an authentic partnership, and that’s what you want when you do a partnership,” Dell’s chief marketing officer Geraldine Tunnell said. “How do you ensure that it’s natural on both sides? We can bring great technology. Obviously, UT knows how to make it work with the students.”
The actual AI provider is Google, as Bevo Lab will use its Cloud Platform and Gemini agentic AI system to generate real-time sports intelligence. And the technologies and data are all operating under one unified platform thanks to IT infrastructure company SHI International.
Goldsberry’s hope is that the new technology that UT students are perfecting can help UT coaches win as many competitions as possible.
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While it didn’t go as planned last weekend, Sarkisian and the Longhorns are just getting started with their new AI tool.
“We’re trying to put good data and good intelligence in front of our coaches,” Goldsberry said, “so that they can make informed decisions and informed strategies to help us ultimately win more competitions at The University of Texas.”