The Leading Indicator
Every team measures things. The question is: are you measuring what matters, or measuring what's easy?
Founder, Eyes Up
The Metric Problem
Walk into any college football facility and you'll see numbers everywhere. Squat maxes on whiteboards. 40 times in the hallway. GPA lists outside the academic office. Body composition charts in the weight room.
Programs are obsessed with measurement. And they should be—what gets measured gets managed. But there's a problem: almost everything we measure is a lagging indicator.
A squat max tells you what happened over the last 8 weeks of training. A 40 time tells you the result of months of sprint work. GPA reflects a semester of decisions. These are outputs. Results. History.
Leading vs. Lagging
A leading indicator predicts future performance. It tells you what's coming before it arrives. It gives you time to adjust.
Sleep is the ultimate leading indicator for athletes. Here's why:
- Strength gains happen during sleep. Growth hormone releases primarily during deep sleep. Poor sleep = poor recovery = stalled progress.
- Learning consolidates during sleep. That film session? The new play install? It gets encoded into memory during REM sleep.
- Decision-making degrades without sleep. Reaction time, risk assessment, emotional regulation—all impaired by poor sleep.
- Injury risk increases with sleep debt. Studies show athletes sleeping less than 8 hours have 1.7x higher injury rates.
The Identity Effect
Here's what most programs miss: the metric you elevate becomes your team's identity.
If you celebrate big squat numbers, your players will chase big squat numbers. If you post 40 times, your players will optimize for the 40. Whatever you measure and publicize, your culture will orient around.
This is powerful—and it's a choice. What if you chose to make sleep the primary metric? What happens then?
- Players start making different decisions at night
- Peer accountability emerges around sleep habits
- The behaviors that destroy sleep (partying, substances, screens) become culturally unacceptable
- All the other metrics—strength, speed, grades—start improving as a byproduct
The Multiplier Effect
Your players are already doing a lot right. They're eating protein. They're lifting. They're watching film. They're taking classes seriously (mostly).
But without quality sleep, they're operating at 60-70% efficiency on all of it. The protein doesn't absorb as well. The lifting doesn't produce the same gains. The film doesn't stick. The studying doesn't translate.
Sleep is the multiplier. It's not adding another thing to your program—it's making everything you already do work better.
By making sleep your primary KPI, you're not tracking another metric. You're giving your players the foundation that makes everything else they're doing actually pay off.
The Visibility Gap
The challenge has always been visibility. You can see a player's squat. You can time their 40. You can check their GPA. But sleep? That happens off-campus, outside your control, invisible to coaching staff.
Until now. Wearable technology has made sleep measurable. What was once a black box is now data. The question is: what will you do with it?
Eyes Up exists to turn that data into insight—and that insight into cultural change.