The future of NFL computerized player tr

They make footballs at the Wilson factory in Ada, Ohio. And since 2017 they've been making them a little differently for the NFL.A regulation-sized football weighs 400 grams (please, spare us your Deflategate jokes). Melded into the bladder of the football is a Troy Brown Jr. Jersey nickel-sized piece of technology that weighs a whole 4 grams. That radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag sends signals to receiver boxes set up in every NFL stadium, and metrics like height and velocity and even RPMs are measured for every single throw of every single game.Zebra Technologies is entering its eighth season in partnership with the NFL, and the data that ultimately makes the league's Next Gen Stats comes from the tags in the football, individual player shoulder pads, first-down markers and the pylons.And in reporting this story, what I found is that the future of NFL data collection and analytics is hard to predict. "Where things can go with the data," says Matt Swen son, the NFL's VP of emerging products and technology, "you can get pretty broad pretty quickly."Computerized player tracking in the NFL as we know it today is about to enter its teenage years. The league experimented with optical tracking as early as 2009, but it proved too ineffective for wide-scale collection. Following the completion of the 2011 CBA, both the players union and NFL commi sioner Roger Goodell showed strong interest in diving into player tracking in earnest. By the 2014 season, the league had partnered with Zebra thanks to its extensive background in RFID technology in retail, manufacturing and warehouse environments.The evolution and refinement of this data has been rapid. By 2015, all venues that hosted NFL games were equipped with RFID receivers. Balls began getting tagged in 2016, but just for preseason games and Thursday Night Football. Each club then began getting their own game data, and the league started putting more on its front-facing Next Gen Stats website. More advanced stats came in 2017 with the help of Amazon's cloud computing services, and in 2018 the league gave all game data to all clubs each week while implementing the new kickoff rules that prohibited the kicking team from getting a running start after, in part, seeing player speeds from the tags and matching that with concu sion data. It was around that point that John Pollard, Zebra's VP of busine s development, saw a turning point among fans and media in their collective acceptance of miles-per- Dwight Howard Jersey hour as a football stat. We became more comfortable with the idea of how fast 19 MPH actually was, and that a quarterback reaching a is fast."Eight to 10 years ago none of us would have thought miles-per-hour was going to be a metric of any consideration in American football," Pollard says. "Within the last two to three years, all the broadcast partners have become much more comfortable and fluent in the tracking data and leveraging it in the proce s of providing new dimensions to storytelling in a game."I'd say over the last two seasons in particular we've worked really closely at trying to find new project opportunities things I can't talk Jerian Grant Jersey about today specifically that we're working on to help support game plan evaluation, game operational proce ses and team proce ses as well." So as to not keep you in suspense throughout this piece, let's go ahead and get this out of the way. If there are markers in the football and pylons and first-down sticks, are we heading for an electronic first down or touchdown?The answer: potentially, yes. But no time soon."Inevitably people consistently ask about ball placement," Pollard says. "Is it feasible that RFID technologies, other technologies, can help support game management proce ses? Yeah, it's technically feasible. Technology can provide added benefits and there are opportunities for that. What those are, we're still in a period of discovery and consideration. But in terms of accuracy and locationing, we're pretty close."RFID can be accurate to within 3 or so inches, which is much more accurate than GPS tracking. But it still would need to be more precise in order to dictate what is or isn't a first down in a game like the 2017 Cowboys-Raiders contest where our own Gene Steratore took the unusual step of at the end of the football to affirm his call. Plus, the tag in the ball doesn't indicate when Deni Avdija Jersey a knee or elbow is down. And of course you can't tag body parts on every player. Some sort of optical tracking like Hawk-Eye in tennis would be needed in conjunction with the RFID tags in balls and markers."I do think it's po sible. It's not po sible today," Swen son says. "I think it comes through a combination of optical and camera-based feeds with tracking data. And then us getting to a precision level that we're comfortable with. We're just not there yet."OK, so what is being done? And what can be done? Especially when the league is capturing 200 different metrics We all can see the front-facing metrics they release on the Next Gen Stats site, and so many of those stats have been integrated into broadcasts and in-stadium videoboards. Rush efficiency measures the total distance a ball-carrier traveled against rushing yards gained (a list a north-south runner like tops nearly annually.) The Air Yards to Sticks uses the RFID tags in the first-down markers to see how far the ball traveled in relation to the sticks. The pa sing aggre sivene s measurement leverages tags in ball, receiver and defender to see how closely the intended target was covered at the time it was deemed catchable.But there's a trove of information the media and public does not see. The day after any game, all 32 clubs get a data dump from the previous day's game(s). And they can use the helpful tools provided by the league and/or take the whole lump sum of data and have their employees run their proprietary analytics on it. (The have been in the league without a staffer with "analytics" in their title, though that seems to be changing soon after posting in June.)"There's two kinds of mechanisms that clubs interact with the data," Swen son says. "There's the raw side where they can take all the information where they Jerome Robinson Jersey have some special tools they've built internally. But then we as a league provide them a tool to go through and see every play. They can scrub through the tracking data synced up with video and can see all the different stats that are generated for that play. And then we have aggregate information, whether at the team or player level, that they can look at as well." NFL clubs are wildly protective of their analytics departments, but here are some of examples of the po sibilities:Want to help your pro personnel department? Are your special teams gunners not getting to the returner as quickly as you'd like? Scour the data for some of the league's fastest gunners who may get cut for whatever reason, then pick that player up off waivers.Need to reinforce what your quarterback or offensive coordinator i