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Advancing the NFL with AWS Analytics

The National Football League (NFL) is taking machine learning and applied data science to the field.

The 2020 NFL season is close to kicking off. And they are using machine learning with Amazon Web Services to power some of their most impactful data points such as –

  • Expected Rushing Yards: designed to estimate the number of yards a running-back will gain on any particular carry (what does this mean?)
  • Expected Yards After Catch: The NFL is leveraging SageMaker to predict the estimated number of yards after the ball is caught (not familiar with this term?). A number of other factors will be tracked as well, such as how open a particular receiver is on a given play (here’s a helpful link for learning more about this term?), how fast the player is running, and how many opposing players are in the surrounding area.
  • Route Classification: this is intended to help you, the fans! The NFL wants to help educate the viewers with a closer look and feel to the game by contextualizing the types of routes offensive players (wide receivers) are running.

And in order to do this, the NFL is going to be capturing data with RFID tags on the players’ shoulder pads. Ultra-wideband receivers will track players as well as the football, down to the nearest inch. This data will be collected and processed using a number of AWS services like: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), and Elastic Map Reduce (EMR).

The data points collected will then be run through machine learning models on SageMaker to create the ultimate data-driven assist and predictions.

And lastly, the data and insight will be distributed through services like Lambda, ElastiCache, QuickSight, Relational Database Service (RDS), Simple Storage Service (S3), API Gateway, and DynamoDB for illustrating predictive analysis and other visual analytical tools to help bring You closer to the game.

Here’s a cool video Amazon Web Services put out today to get fans hyped about the season and the more in-depth view fans will be getting with these predictive and analytical tools leveraged through the AWS platform –

Resources mentioned in this article:

Dale Yarborough

By Dale Yarborough

I am a Software Engineer at General Motors and Appalachian State University Alum. Previously: Whole Foods Market IT, Charles Schwab

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