Football fans wondering whether the next handoff to a running back could be another Beast Quake have another stat to track thanks to Next Gen Stats, the platform powered by Amazon Web Services.
The new stat, called Expected Rush Yards, was born out of the National Football League’s Big Data Bowl, a data analytics competition which focused on the run game this year and sought to answer the question, “When an NFL ball carrier takes a handoff, how many yards should we expect him to gain on the play?”
According to Amazon, more than 2,000 people participated in the open-source contest and a two-person team from Austria — who had more expertise in machine learning than American football — came away as winners. Philipp Singer and Dmitry Gordeev, who went by the team name “The Zoo,” broke down how they built their model and the NFL’s Next Gen Stats team spent the off-season implementing that model to create the new rushing metric. The NFL used Amazon SageMaker, a tool that provides the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly.
The stat is designed to show how many rushing yards a ball-carrier is expected to gain on a given carry based on the relative location, speed, and direction of blockers and defenders. Amazon said a number of primary metrics can now be derived from the new stat — Expected Rushing Yards, Rushing Yards Over Expected, Rushing Yards Over Expected per Attempt, Rush Percentage Over Expected, First Down Probability, and Touchdown Probability.
To best illustrate how each of these metrics is derived from the Expected Rushing Yards model, let's break down the 88-yard touchdown run by the Browns' Nick Chubb against the Ravens last season.https://t.co/gFjGNJCt7w
— Next Gen Stats (@NextGenStats) July 20, 2020
The NFL has used AWS cloud computing technology for Next Gen Stats since 2015 and introduced machine learning to the mix in 2017. The stats rely on data from player- and ball-tracking devices to produce advanced statistics like distance covered, speed, and acceleration. In-game stats include everything from what route a receiver might run to which team is expected to win. The information is shown to fans online and on TV broadcasts; teams also leverage the data internally for strategic purposes.
Beyond the ins and outs of stats, Amazon’s connection to the NFL continues this season with the streaming of “Thursday Night Football” games on Prime Video and Twitch.
Prime Members will be able to stream 11 games on assorted devices. Here’s the schedule:
- Oct. 8 – Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Chicago Bears
- Oct. 15 – Kansas City Chiefs at Buffalo Bills
- Oct. 22 – New York Giants at Philadelphia Eagles
- Oct. 29 – Atlanta Falcons at Carolina Panthers
- Nov. 5 – Green Bay Packers at San Francisco 49ers
- Nov. 12 – Indianapolis Colts at Tennessee Titans
- Nov. 19 – Arizona Cardinals at Seattle Seahawks
- Dec. 3 – Dallas Cowboys at Baltimore Ravens
- Dec. 10 – New England Patriots at Los Angeles Rams
- Dec. 17 – Los Angeles Chargers at Las Vegas Raiders
- Dec. 25 – Minnesota Vikings at New Orleans Saints
