The future of NFL computerized player tracking and data collection: Its rapid evolution and what comes next
Tags are already in the football, shoulder pads, pylons and more; here's where player tracking is headed
They make footballs at the Wilson factory in Ada, Ohio. And since 2017 they've been making them a little differently for the NFL.
A regulation-sized football weighs 400 grams (please, spare us your Deflategate jokes). Melded into the bladder of the football is a nickel-sized piece of technology that weighs a whole 4 grams. That radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag sends signals to receiver boxes set up in every NFL stadium, and metrics like height and velocity and even RPMs are measured for every single throw of every single game.
Zebra Technologies is entering its eighth season in partnership with the NFL, and the data that ultimately makes the league's Next Gen Stats comes from the tags in the football, individual player shoulder pads, first-down markers and the pylons.
And in reporting this story, what I found is that the future of NFL data collection and analytics is hard to predict.
"Where things can go with the data," says Matt Swensson, the NFL's VP of emerging products and technology, "you can get pretty broad pretty quickly."
Computerized player tracking in the NFL as we know it today is about to enter its teenage years. The league experimented with optical tracking as early as 2009, but it proved too ineffective for wide-scale collection. Following the completion of the 2011 CBA, both the players union and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell showed strong interest in diving into player tracking in earnest. By the 2014 season, the league had partnered with Zebra thanks to its extensive background in RFID technology in retail, manufacturing and warehouse environments.