AWS and the National Football League Announce New Next Gen Stats Powered by AWS for the 2020 Season
September 09 2020 - 9:00AM
Business Wire
The six new advanced statistics, which combine
player tracking and machine learning, will launch on September 10
during NFL season opener to bring new insights to game play
Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company
(NASDAQ: AMZN), and the National Football League (NFL) announced
they will debut six new insights through the NFL’s Next Gen Stats
platform powered by AWS during the September 10th season kickoff
game between the Houston Texans and the Super Bowl Champion Kansas
City Chiefs. The new advanced stats will appear in live broadcasts
and online throughout the 2020 season, offering fans a better
understanding of the game, their favorite players, and teams’
performances. Covering everything from the expected yards a team
will gain on a rush, to the probability a team will win a game, the
new stats combine on-field action and cloud technology, including
machine learning, to engage fans in real time from season kickoff
through the Super Bowl.
The NFL has used AWS compute technology for its Next Gen Stats
platform since 2015, and began using AWS machine learning services
to enhance Next Gen Stats in 2017. These stats help teams, players,
broadcasters, and fans better understand and appreciate football,
using more than 300 million data points collected each season to
generate compelling new content, including data from sensors in
players’ gear and game balls, as well as reference points
throughout NFL stadiums. The new Next Gen Stats powered by AWS for
the 2020 NFL Season are:
- Expected Rush Yards – Helps showcase the speed,
elusiveness, and abilities of running backs by predicting how many
yards a rusher is likely to gain with the ball upon handoff. A team
of independent data scientists created the algorithm that powers
the stat during the 2020 Big Data Bowl, the NFL’s annual sports
analytics contest.
- Route Classification – Automatically identifies in real
time the route a player runs on a pass play – go, post, or out –
providing the groundwork for a new understanding of offensive
strategy and tendencies, while also delivering metrics to rank the
performance of individual players, team offenses, and team defenses
by route.
- Expected Points – Calculates the likelihood of either
team scoring next and by what means (i.e., touchdown, field goal,
and safety), enabling analysts, coaches, and fans to quantify the
impact of an individual play on helping a team score.
- Win Probability – Assigns a win likelihood percentage to
each team—adjusted in real time throughout the game—to identify
changes in momentum and the plays that are most likely to impact
game outcome.
- Expected Yards After Catch (xYAC) – Predicts how far a
receiver is likely to gain with the ball upon completing a catch.
Similar to Expected Rush Yards, this stat helps identify how
receivers are able to improvise and elude defenders to gain yards
after receiving the ball.
- Field Goal Probability – Quantifies the likelihood of a
team scoring a field goal given the distance of the kick and
weather conditions.
The NFL will rely on the breadth and depth of AWS services to
generate these insights and scale its analysis of action on the
field, processing more than one million data points during every
game. Leveraging Amazon SageMaker, AWS’s fully managed service for
easily building, training, and deploying machine learning models
quickly, the NFL was able to rapidly iterate and train multiple
variations of the machine learning models that power the stats to
achieve the best performance. In addition, the NFL uses Amazon
Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store on-field data for quick
and secure reference, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
to process that data, making it possible to provide real-time
insights to fans at home. The full set of Next Gen Stats from 2020
and earlier NFL seasons are available for use in live broadcasts
and afterwards in online replays.
“This season’s Next Gen Stats powered by AWS represent the NFL’s
continued investment in cloud technology to improve not only the
fan experience for millions of people around the world, but also
the way the game is played,” said Matt Swensson, Vice President,
Emerging Products and Technology at the NFL. “Our partnership with
AWS and the use of machine learning have enabled our fans to better
understand the remarkable performance of the athletes on the field.
They have also uncovered opportunities for NFL teams to use this
data to improve their performance by breaking down the action in
new ways and analyzing plays at a deeper level after the game.”
“AWS is proud to continue its partnership with the NFL to bring
engaging data to life through Next Gen Stats and enhance the
football experience for everyone in the NFL community – fans,
players, coaches, broadcasters, and more,” said Greg Pearson, Vice
President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “In the 2020 season,
we’re going to expand on the already compelling set of Next Gen
Stats to underscore the talent on the field and help people better
understand and appreciate the strategic decisions needed to be made
and the incredible athletic feats on the field.”
To learn more about the 2020 Next Gen Stats powered by AWS and
AWS’s involvement with the NFL, please visit:
https://aws.amazon.com/nfl.
About Amazon Web Services
For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most
comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over
175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases,
networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial
intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security,
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application development, deployment, and management from 77
Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with
announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS
Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. Millions of
customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest
enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power
their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn
more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.
About Amazon
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amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.
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