Just in time for the 2024 season, the National Football League and Amazon Web Services Inc. continue to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence and machine learning in football. Through a partnership that began in 2017, the NFL has used AWS technology to improve player performance analysis, game strategies and fan experiences.
Upcoming NFL games will showcase a new AI-powered tool, Tackle Probability, that analyzes and predicts the likelihood of a defender making a tackle in real time. The tool identifies the most dependable defenders and the hardest-to-catch ball carriers. It also provides data on key performance metrics, such as missed tackles and successful attempts, offering teams valuable insights for offensive and defensive strategies.
More specifically, Tackle Probability looks at 20 different factors, including the position and speed of each defender, every 10th of a second. Using these data points, an AI model, trained on five years of past game data, calculates the likelihood of a tackle happening at any given moment in a play. From this data, the model creates new stats like how often defenders attempt tackles without missing or how frequently running backs force missed tackles. This helps coaches see which players are the most reliable at tackling or avoiding tackles.
Tackle Probability is a feature within Next Gen Stats, the NFL’s player and ball tracking platform, which relies heavily on AWS to process an enormous amount of data collected from games. The platform gathers over 500 million data points each season, providing the NFL with advanced statistics that improve the viewing experience and aid gameplay decisions. This includes rule changes such as the new Dynamic Kickoff to minimize high-speed collisions and injuries during kickoffs by adjusting player positioning and movement.
Digital Athlete is another tool developed using AWS to improve player safety. The tool simulates game and practice scenarios to help coaches and medical staff assess injury risks so they can develop prevention and recovery plans for each player. One could think of this as building a digital twin of players and then running them through various scenarios to better understand when and how injuries occur. Teams can use that data to avoid those situations and keep the players on the field longer.
In addition to improving player safety, AWS is working with NFL Media to implement Amazon Q Business, an AI assistant that answers business and production-related questions. It acts like an automated helpdesk for common technical or operational inquiries. NFL Media also introduced an Amazon Bedrock-powered research tool that allows production teams to gather insights and footage from specific plays in the NFL’s Next Gen Stats database using simple language prompts.
The NFL believes these developments will boost productivity by automating routine tasks and speeding up research. Rather than spending time on repetitive activities, teams can focus on creating high-quality content across NFL Media’s properties, such as the NFL Network, NFL Films, NFL.com, NFL+, the NFL app and social media channels.
Many innovations, including Tackle Probability, are inspired by submissions from the AWS Big Data Bowl, created five years ago to develop new ways of using the NFL’s Next Gen Stats. The program creates an open platform for engineers, data scientists, students, and others without sports experience to get involved in football analytics.
The competition has grown fourfold since its inception in 2019, with more than 230 submissions from 400 participants last year and participants from more than 75 countries in the half-decade that it has run. By democratizing access to data, the NFL and AWS can accelerate creativity and innovation. For the participants since the inception of the Big Data Bowl, more than 50 participants have landed jobs in professional sports analytics, with 30+ being hired by NFL teams or player-tracking vendors.
Sports leagues have a wealth of data, much of which has gone untapped for decades. One of the challenges is finding experts who understand data and the respective sport to derive value. Generative AI enables anyone, with or without a data sciences or sports background, to find new ways of leveraging that data to deliver operational value and create new fan experiences.
