The Spring King had seen it all, every way to comb through every possible offensive concept at every conceivable level of football, until Luis Perez stepped into A.J. Smith’s world in April. It came within the , thousands of practice and game clips loaded into a virtual-reality database. And it came at the perfect time this spring to Perez, a veteran spring-league quarterback traded midseason to the UFL’s St. Louis Battlehawks and tasked with learning the system of offensive coordinator Smith. Fast.
At Smith’s behest, Perez strapped on a headset and spent hours each day using a pair of virtual-reality goggles. “I was kind of in awe,” Perez recalled. He could turn his head and scan the field inside a living, moving playbook, where a VR program placed his vantage point directly over the shoulder of any quarterback who’d ever played for Smith. He could toggle over to a play-call — “Nebraska,” for example, a concept with a couple in-breaking routes — and evaluate how his reads played out against a variety of coverages.
Cover 2. .Cover 4. .Cover 3 Buzz. Click.
“It’s a new thing,” Perez told The Denver Post Wednesday. “But I think it’s something that’s going to be a necessity at some point, once everybody gets their hands on it. Because they’re going to see an advantage. And even at the Division I level, you’re trying to find a 1% advantage.”
Extra reps off the field
In a matter of weeks, the 37-year-old Smith will bring his virtual-reality systems to Boulder to work with CU’s quarterbacks, an under-the-radar analyst hire to Deion Sanders’ staff that could prove consequential for 18-year-old sophomore Julian Lewis. At Big 12 Media Days earlier this week, Lewis set the collegiate football world ablaze by telling ESPN he “wasn’t really looking at defenses as much” and was “free-balling” during the Buffs’ 3-9 season in 2025.
Now, the former blue-chip recruit will have access to a system that Smith hopes will have a Gladwellian effect — filming every concept called by new OC Brennan Marion during CU’s training camp and immersing Lewis and other quarterbacks in first-person virtual reality playback of the playbook to better read defenses.
“My whole goal is to move you up a class,” Smith told The Post this week. “So what I mean by that is – if you’re a freshman, if I can put you in the system and get you 10,000 reps of our plays before you hit the field, I want you to feel more like a sophomore. Because you’ve gotten things you can’t get without this technology. And so thatap the growth you’ll see with (Lewis), is the mental side.”
The 31-year-old Perez, for his part, is an old dog who learned this new trick this spring. Such software, Perez told The Post, can be “exponentially better” when applied to, say, an 18-year-old sophomore QB in Lewis who in Georgia.
“You can really break everything down, right?” Perez described, rattling off a list of examples. “The route depth — what are we doing with this dig route? Who are we trying to influence?”
“I think for someone like that,” Perez said of Lewis, a few sentences later, “this will be really beneficial if taught right.”
An innovator in the QB realm
Smith will serve as a teacher, a hyperactive offensive mind who began his coaching career at age 19 in Louisiana high school football and has . A self-described spring football “fanatic,” Smith wandered up to Boulder this winter to interview for a slew of offensive openings at Colorado, and decided to take an assistant quarterbacks role working under Marion. His five-year career in the UFL (formerly XFL and USFL) was done, he decided.
Then St. Louis head coach Ricky Proehl called Smith in December to offer him the Battlehawks’ play-calling job. Smith called Colorado back.
He wound up accepting both.
How, exactly, has he fulfilled separate professional and collegiate coaching jobs at once? Smith argues they don’t overlap. Not exactly. Smith arrived in Colorado Jan. 3, took a week-long came back to Colorado in February, then left before spring ball to coach the 6-4 Battlehawks for four months.
“I just wanted my cake,” Smith said, voice lifting with a smile, “and to eat it too.”
At some point in that winter haze, while under a temporary agreement with CU, Smith installed his virtual-reality software and showed staffers how to film plays — with a camera directly behind the quarterback — during spring ball to upload into the program. Back in 2010, while serving as the youngest offensive coordinator , Smith began to realize that a younger generation wasn’t so much interested in physical playbooks as in interactive screens. So he taught himself to code and built an initial rough virtual-reality film system that he called a “super-Madden” while .
Smith kept adding with yearly advancements in virtual-reality software and artificial intelligence, while . Over the past decade, software has become a crucial tool for quarterbacks to learn their own offensive systems.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Battlehawks quarterback Michael Pratt, a former seventh-round NFL draft pick, in an April video from St. Louis’s X account.
extra reps off the field 👀
AJ Smith and Michael Pratt explain the VR technology used to give Battlehawks quarterbacks an edge.
— St. Louis Battlehawks (@BattlehawksUFL)
Others have. Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels, the NFL’s 2024 Offensive Rookie of the Year, . The next level of such software, which Daniels reps and Smith’s hand-built program includes, is the ability to speed up practice clips inside the headset to accelerate mental processing.
“Cognitively, you see guys running so fast that when we go, ‘OK, now make the read in real time,’ real time seems slow,” Smith said. “So if we’ve slowed the game down, we’ve accomplished something.”
Can that slow the game down for Lewis, who said point-blank this week that he was still taking a high school approach to a collegiate offense last year? In his first two starts at the end of a lost season in 2025, Lewis completed 56.1% of his passes for 460 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions. Solid — but Marion’s new offense will need more explosiveness after CU finished 15th in the Big 12 in scoring offense last year.
Smith is betting he can help.
“I’ve yet to find a quarterback,” Smith said, “that really doesn’t gravitate to this.”
