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Playing the data field: Tracking NFL stats in real time | #SportsDataSV 2015
Tracking statistics in sports is nothing new, but add in sensors that provide real-time tracking and the ability to analyze the data, and you have a whole new ball game.
Michael King, director of sports products for Zebra Technologies Corp., joined John Furrier and Jeff Frick, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at the SAP Center in San Jose, CA, for SportsDataSV 2015, to provide some color commentary on the National Football League’s (NFL) use of next-gen stats.
Zebra Technologies is a provider of real-time location solutions, providing the NFL with the ability to track each player, on each team, in all 31 venues while generating valuable statistics for the League, teams, coaches and players. King believes that by 2017, all balls, sticks and chains will have sensors as well.
The need to see speed
The initiative began with the NFL pilot program to track players in order to learn and evaluate events leading up to injuries, as well as tracking the injuries. “Placing sensors on the pads of each player to track movement allows the league to see x-y position, accumulated distance, speed (both acceleration and deceleration) and orientation,” King said.
These “next-gen” stats, as the NFL calls them, land on the organization’s Twitter page and on the Xbox NFL app every Monday and Tuesday. The focus is on stats such as the maximum and average velocity of players and speed reports. Referring to the use of this technology in various sports and the demand for more options, King said, “The world we are in now, everybody wants all the data.”
The value of e-sports
The NFL collaborates with EA Sports Madden games, and King said the new technology allows players at home to recreate some memorable plays. However, the real value in e-sports for the NFL is to recreate games in Virtual Reality (VR) for training purposes. VR gives a player to see things the way they actually happened in the game and the opportunity to adjust their actions.
“We are much closer to using data in real time during games,” according to King.
Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of SportsDataSV 2015.
Photo by SiliconANGLE
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