The latest in NFL gear: sensors on every player
You want data with your NFL games? Get ready for a blitz.
In its race toward a data-driven future, the league has embedded wireless tracking sensors into every player’s shoulder pads, to track details like speed and acceleration. Sensors are being used on yard markers and, for some games this year, the football itself.
The data, which is fed into a special command center at Zebra Technologies in San Jose, could eventually combine with computerized artificial intelligence and machine learning to dictate the game plans of head coaches.
“Data like this can be used in many different ways, like how you line up, who you put in the first quarter or in the fourth quarter,” Zebra Vice President Jill Stelfox said during the first press tour of the command center last week. “It’s not just athletic performance.”
Zebra, an Illinois company that
builds and manages tracking systems used by businesses, is in the third year of a five-year contract with the NFL to develop a wireless sensor system to precisely track the in-game movements of all the players on the 32 NFL teams. It’s a sea change for a sport that for decades has judged the worth of its players based on simple numbers, such as total number of passing yards or quarterback sacks.
“When you think about it, statistics in the NFL have really been stagnant for the better part of 20 years,” said Eric Petrosinelli, general manager of Zebra’s sports division.
New technologies are already providing sports fans with an extraordinary array of statistics. Major League Baseball, for example, uses a system of video and radar tracking that instantly tells fans how fast the ball comes off the bat, as well as the angle and distance the outfielder runs to catch the ball.
Sports analytics has become big business. WinterGreen Research of Lexington, Mass., estimates the market will grow from $125 million in 2014 to $4.5 billion in 2021. “The analytics provide sports broadcasters with more interesting things to say about a game, and they permit the team managers to win more games,” said a report by WinterGreen President Susan Eustis.
Zebra’s work with the NFL is “enormously exciting,” Eustis said in an interview. “Any time you can make sure the players are performing at their highest level, this is to everyone’s advantage.”
For the past two seasons, Zebra has placed coin-size radio-frequency identification, or RFID, chips inside the shoulder pads of each player. One chip goes in each pad to determine which direction the player is pointing. (Tracking stops at the end of each game. Zebra has installed transmitters that automatically turn the chips off when players enter their locker rooms.)
Zebra has also attached two chips under the collars of all the referees’ shirts. And for preseason games, the official Wilson game balls have a chip inside, just under the laces. The chips may also be used for Thursday night games this season, according to NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy, but that is yet to be decided. (Thursday night games would provide a good “sample size,” he said, without rolling it out for all 256 regular-season games.)
The sensors track movement to within 6 inches. The NFL’s use of them encouraged Boeing executives to install a similar Zebra system that gives notice if painters move to a position in which they risk a fall while working on airplanes.
Zebra has installed 20 to 25 devices in each stadium that read the signals and transmit the data to San Jose, where about a dozen Zebra employees can see the location data displayed on their screens a few seconds before the TV broadcast feed.
The RFID data can show the player’s speed, distance traveled, acceleration and deceleration. From that, coaches and players will both be able to see, for example, exactly how far a wide receiver diverged from his intended pass route, or how much he had to accelerate to catch a ball.
Stelfox, vice president and general manager of Zebra’s location solutions unit, said official NFL statistics show only forward progress, such as three yards gained on a running play.
“But how much did somebody run to get those three yards?” she said last week during the tour of the command center. “You’ve seen those plays where they’ve run around 15 or 20 yards to get three. If you know that as a trainer, you can train for it.”
Coaches might use the data to uncover trends about an individual, she said. “So if you know if you rest your key guy for two minutes every quarter that he’ll last longer in the fourth, then you would do it,” she said.
Zebra and the NFL have tested the system for the past two seasons, but they provided data to individual teams only after the season ended. This season, for the first time, teams will receive the data the day after games.
NFL broadcasters are using the data in their telecasts, and the data already help feed the Next Gen Stats feature of the NFL app for owners of Microsoft’s Xbox One home video game consoles.
“The information garnered has been used by broadcasters, and we will continue to work with our clubs and NFL Media group to provide more data,” NFL spokesman McCarthy said in an email.
However, the league’s competition committee still has to decide whether to use RFID chips inside balls during regular-season games. If they do, the chips might be used to tell fans and broadcasters how close the ball came to the goal posts, or “how far the ball travels on a particular play,” he said.
Zebra is also working with the NBA’s developmental league and has run tests with other sports. However, Eustis said Zebra still has to persuade the player unions in other sports to play along.
“They need to work on how the data is going to be used to convince the players this is going to be in their interest,” she said. NBA players have opposed data gathering for fear the coaches will use the information against them, she said.
A spokesman for the National Basketball Players Association declined comment because the technology is part of ongoing collective bargaining agreement negotiations.
In the future, Stelfox believes location sensors will become commonplace, revealing trends that coaches, trainers and players will combine with artificialintelligence technology to help with tactical decisions during games.
“Whether it’s in five years or 10 years, the idea of making real-time decisions at games will come for sports in general,” she said.