On the opening drive of Sunday’s Pro Bowl, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes found his tight end, the Colts’ Eric Ebron, wide open for an easy touchdown. Thanks to the NFL’s experimental real-time Next Gen Stats portal, fans could see just how much separation Ebron had.
At the time Mahomes released the ball, the tracking data shows that the nearest defender, Lions cornerback Darius Slay, was 5.7 yards from Ebron and moving farther away while covering another receiver. When Ebron caught the ball inside the five yard line, Slay was a full 13 yards from Ebron, who easily scored. For comparison, the league average separation on a pass was 2.82 yards this season.
The NFL made all of this Next Gen Stats tracking data available for the first time—some of it live, some of it at the end of the game—in what could be an exciting fan engagement or additional broadcast tool. There also could be sports betting applications, although the league had no comment on that possibility and remained focused on asking how fans might benefit from this new data source.
“Is watching the tracking data live an interesting second-screen experience?” said Michael Schaefer, NFL senior product manager for emerging products and technology. “We’re also curious about fans who would be out of market—would this be a better way to consume a game rather than watching it with our existing experiences, watching the play-by-play descriptions slowly come through?”
The NFL began using Zebra Technologies’ RFID location system in 2014 and has tracked every game since 2015. Only in 2018, however, did teams gain access to league-wide data and not just what was generated by their own players. Schaefer said that global distribution was an important hurdle to cross before developing this Next Gen Stats experience.
While Next Gen Stats are incorporated into some NFL broadcasts—and will be a part of CBS’ Super Bowl coverage—those uses are typically limited. Additional tracking data is published on NFL Network and social channels, but often only one play is diagrammed per game, whereas every Pro Bowl snap can be seen in this format. The play diagram tool was originally developed for the teams to use but was made widely available for the Pro Bowl.
A host of additional data is accessible, too, such as in-depth passing charts, rushing yards by direction on the field, and pass rusher separation from the quarterback. At a Super Bowl press conference, Zebra’s VP of sports business development, John Pollard, shared a number of other advanced metrics derived from this tracking data. These new stats could potentially be added in the future, such as defensive backs’ coverage quality and closing speed, teams’ offensive tempo, and quarterbacks’ completion percentage when throwing into tight windows, which was defined as a defender within 1.5 yards of the receiver.
A few months ago, the NFL’s product team began developing algorithms that would draw on the available years of tracking data as well as all historical play-by-play data to predict whether a coach would run or pass. Schaefer suggested this could be used on TV for key plays, such as 4th-and-1 or 3rd-and-5. (Or just ask Tony Romo.)
“This is something that we think could be interesting for broadcast as a way of explaining to fans who can understand the game maybe in a context they hadn’t seen before,” Schaefer said, “which is trying to get in the coach’s mind for a second and try to understand situationally what typically the league does.”
The most common complaint, Schaefer said, was that the Next Gen Stats was actually too fast. The moving icons representing the players and football on the screen were delayed only by a few milliseconds whereas the television feed trails live action anywhere from five to 20 seconds. Those following the new tracking data interface as a second screen had a time-jumbled experience.
“The only negative thing we heard from fans, which is kind of funny and we probably wouldn’t have thought of this as a negative in advance, was that our data was significantly ahead of television,” Schaefer said, before adding: “We had some good feedback and a lot to learn from that we can use to shape what a possible future experience would be like. Delaying the data, I think, would be fairly trivial for us, and it makes a lot of sense to sync it up with the broadcast.”
While the NBA, NHL, and MLB have all begun licensing their real-time tracking data to sports books such as MGM, the NFL has not yet followed suit. When the Supreme Court first struck down PASPA and paved the way for state-by-state legalization of sports betting, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said the league wanted fans to “have access to official, reliable league data.” The NFL has since added Caesars Entertainment as its first official casino sponsor, although that deal does not include any data sharing or betting partnership.
For now, the public focus of this Pro Bowl Next Gen Stats portal was all about a trial run for fan engagement, and the NFL was pleased with those results.
“We didn’t market it too extensively, so it was a good proof of concept for us,” Schaefer said. “The system held up well from an infrastructure side, in terms of dynamically balancing the load from all these users that were hitting our site concurrently.”