The NFL’s annual pitch competition, 1st & Future, honored a neck-strengthening training device and a light therapy that aims to boost hormone and peptide production as the prize winners in the Innovations to Advance Athlete Health and Safety Competition.
A new second category created to solicit data-driven ideas to improve safety on punt plays awarded money to four submissions, with two receiving Super Bowl tickets as an additional prize. The pitch competition was hosted by Georgia Tech, sponsored by Arrow Electronics, and took place the day before Super Bowl LIII.
TopSpin took home first place and a $50,000 grant in the athlete safety category. The company’s idea is based on research indicating that for every additional pound of neck strength, concussion risk is lowered by five percent.
The flagship product, the TopSpin360, is a helmet with a horizontal weighted rod attached to the top. A user can spin the rod by gyrating his or her head around. The concept is that by doing this, the user can build multiplanar neuromuscular strength, which will help keep the head stable even when the body is subjected to sudden impulses from hits on the field. The TopSpin360 is outfitted with a data-collecting sensor that transmits over Bluetooth to an accompanying app.
Second place and $20,000 went to Solius, which uses ultraviolet light to increase the natural production of molecules, such as vitamin D, that can boost a person’s immune system and support bone growth. Nobo, TackleBar, and TendoNova were the other finalists.
All four finalists in the NFL Punt Analytics Competition received $20,000, with Alex Waigner and Halla Yang named as co-winners. Participants were able to download player tracking data collected from Zebra Technologies RFID chips to inform their ideas. Next, those concepts will be presented to the league’s Competition Committee for possible adoption.
Waigner, a data engineer at Facebook, proposed on the data science platform Kaggle that players in punt coverage could be allowed to run downfield immediately after the snap. This would encourage more fair catches and, he said, reduce concussions on the plays by about 33 percent through reducing the number of returns.
Yang, a financial analyst in suburban Chicago, offered a three-part proposal on Kaggle. The first idea is to reward fair catches with a five-yard bonus to disincentive returns. Second is outlawing double coverage of the gunners—the wide flank players in punt coverage—which Yang found to show “somewhat higher injury rates.” Third is the use of helmet sensors to gauge a player’s deceleration. While noting some limitation of the tracking data, Yang said that the plays that resulted in injuries tended to involve higher decelerations than those that did not, so using additional wearable technology can improve the understanding of the forces involved.
The NFL made significant changes to its kickoff play prior to last season, based on similar data analysis that was done in-house and by league consultants.
“We’re unaware of any other sports league that has actually gone to the fans and crowdsourced a play to try to improve it,” said NFL EVP Jeff Miller late last month. “So we like the novelty of it but, more importantly, we like the results.”