There was a recent headline on the website Yahoo!Sports asking if college football is “ready to get out of the stone age” by implementing in-game coach-to-player communication via tiny speakers inside players’ helmets. By copying that NFL system in effect since 1994, college coaches could further remove judgement calls from quarterbacks—who just happen to be the fellows in the cockpit of action—and endorse coaches’ control-freak impulses. There even have been reports that, unlike the NFL shut-off deadline of ending communication with 15 seconds left on the play clock, college coaches might be allowed to continue giving directions as a play unfolds.

“Joe’s open at the 10-yard line. Throw to him!”

My first thought, as a card-carrying member of the stone age, was of appalling micromanagement. Autocracy. Something between a general discouragement of athletes using their heads and complete player subservience. Isn’t decision-making an important role in individual performance, a demonstration of competitive awareness that abets physical skill?

“Interfering with the quarterback destroys his confidence,” Col. Red Blaik, who won three national championships during his 18-year career coaching Army, once argued. “He loses his faith in the coach….If the coach has worked properly with his quarterback [in training, the quarterback] knows more about running the works than does the coach.”

OK, Blaik coached in the 1940s and ‘50s. Ancient history. By the time Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown began shuttling “messenger guards” into games with play calls in the mid-50s, the evolution toward robotic quarterbacking had begun in earnest. Brown, in fact, was the first to attempt the use of in-helmet walkie-talkies to decree a specific play, though those primitive gadgets sometimes picked up local radio stations and air-traffic controllers and soon were discarded.

That obviously didn’t stop the march toward dictating real-time orders from the sideline, leaving only the implementation of actions to the on-field cast. By the 1970s, Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry was shuttling his quarterbacks into the huddle on successful plays, a system that neither Roger Staubach nor Craig Morton appreciated.

But typically, critics—fans and commentators—so often ascribe blame for failure to the workers, not the boss. So the modern coach figuratively calls for a forward pass of the buck. (Once, when coach John McKay was asked what he thought of the on-field “execution” of his forever bumbling Tampa Bay Bucs, a first-year expansion team in 1978, he said, “I’m in favor of it.”)

It is difficult to imagine that, for decades, college football had a rule banning any instructions relayed from the bench—subject to a 10-yard penalty. The NFL, too, had such a prohibition until 1944. The first college coach to use baseball-like signals to telegraph plays from the sideline, in 1967, reportedly was Ohio State’s Woody Hayes. (Not that Hayes’ schemes appeared especially creative with a team known for its predictable “three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust” attack.)

Understandably, coaches seek as much control over developments as possible, given that retaining their jobs depends on winning. A belt-and-suspenders approach therefore has come to predominate. Coaches are electronically attached via headsets to assistants who are doing reconnaissance of the enemy from the press box. Signals are sent from the sidelines on “picture boards”—the photo of a bald-headed celebrity (no hair=no running backs) indicates the formation to the players; a drawing of an elephant might signify as so-called “heavy package” of extra tight-ends for short yardage; pictures of books could telegraph that players “read” the defensive alignment. Coaches wave arms, point fingers, pat their heads to relay instructions.

Plus, of course, there is the ubiquitous sight of the coach peering intently at a large laminated card on which he has various options. (A silly social media post, from some Brits self-styled as the Exploding Heads, just surfaced after the Super Bowl, wherein a English bloke accustomed to soccer wonders at many American football oddities, including, “Why is the coach holding a take-away menu?”)

All this military-like maneuvering, and especially the need for secrecy, of course has intensified after the University of Michigan was accused this past season of stealing opponents’ signs. Prominent NCAA coaches have contended that electronically transmitting commands—coach’s lips-to-player’s-ears—would solve the problem and, after some testing at a few bowl games, ought to be implemented forthwith.

From a stone-age perspective, that sounds like giving the coach a joystick and closing in on Esports.