This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.
Every year, shortly after the Super Bowl, America’s best college football players head to Indianapolis. It’s a rite of spring, like the migration of birds. Their destination is the Combine, a weeklong event where National Football League teams evaluate the talent to determine whom they’ll select during the upcoming NFL draft.
In a convention center ballroom not far from the stadium, another “combine” is taking place. Here the marquee event is not the 40-yard dash but the six-minute research presentation. The competitors are not sports stars but data scientists who’ve come for the final round of the Big Data Bowl. Launched by the NFL in 2018, this competition challenges teams of researchers to apply analytics and AI tools to football data.
Over the last several years, analytics have enabled NFL teams to evaluate players in ways not possible before—for example, assessing a defender’s ability to create tackling opportunities, not just completed tackles. Coaches use the metrics to streamline game preparation. And fans, as well as bettors and bookmakers, crave the insights offered by what the NFL calls Next Gen Stats.
Big Data Bowl competitors, like their player counterparts, can be picked up by a football team. About 40 have been hired by some 20 teams, says Mike Lopez, the NFL’s senior director of football data and analytics. Others have joined companies, including Zelus Analytics, StatsBomb and Telemetry Sports, that provide data and services to NFL teams and other sports teams. (Stephanie Kovalchik, a data scientist at Zelus Analytics, described how the same techniques can be applied across different sports in 2023 in the Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application.)
More than 300 entries in 2024’s Big Data Bowl were winnowed to five finalist teams invited to Indianapolis. “You have academics here, industry professionals, students, and…
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