Just when you thought you it was impossible to squeeze any more stats out of an NFL game, the National Football League has announced plans to fit equip players with tracking technology to deliver a feast of Big Data for coaches and fans alike to munch on.

The NFL has just announced a new partnership with Zebra Technologies Corp., an Illinois-based company that’s best known for building barcode readers and inventory tracking software. The company plans to install location-tracking sensors in the shoulder pads of every NFL player, which will provide reams of data to coaches, players and armchair quarterbacks alike.

The idea is to help coaches and fans better analyze player’s performance on the field and work out what they’re doing right and what can be improved.

“These location-tracking devices from Zebra Technologies will provide real-time statistics for every movement of every player on every inch of the field in every NFL game this season,” the company said in a statement.

Zebra’s chips use radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, which is more or less the same tech that retailers and manufacturers use to track merchandise and manage their inventories. The systems requires Zebra to install RFID receivers in all 31 NFL stadiums so they can receive signals from each player that identifies their position, motion and direction throughout the game.

“These sensor tags can blink up to 85 times per second and transmit motion within 120 milliseconds,” the statement said. “If a quarterback is being tightly pressured, the solution will tell the story of exactly when and where.”

The NFL actually signed its data deal with Zebra last year. During the previous football season, the company had 17 stadiums equipped with its technology. Since then, it has worked to get its gear into all of the stadiums.

According to Zebra, the technology “is giving the NFL more of this intelligence and insight into their game than ever before, including player distance traveled, maximum and average speeds, and accelerations and decelerations.”

For now, the data will be of more use to coaches when it comes to reviewing games after the fact. What with so much happening on the sidelines during the games, all of the extra data could prove to be too much of a distraction for coaches at present.

“Initially, it’s really more of the post-game,” Matt Swensson, senior director of Emerging Products and Technology at the NFL, told ZME Science. “Right now, we have a lot of stuff going on on the sidelines. It could just be too much of a distraction during the game. It might be a place we get down the line, but right now it’s not what we’re trying to solve for.”

For armchair quarterbacks watching at home, they’ll also be able to access Zebra’s data with live broadcast graphics. The NFL season kicked off last Thursday with last year’s Super Bowl champions the New England Patriots edging out the Pittsburgh Steelers by 28-21.

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