When it comes to football, everyone has a favorite team. The fans not only cheer their hearts out, but they feel as if they are an integral part of their team. Well, now thanks to big data, fans will feel like they are an even bigger part of the game!
Have you ever found yourself yelling at the television, trying desperately to tell the players what their next critical move should be? With the emerging advancements of big data and analytics, armchair quarterbacks will have up-to-date information and statistics at their fingertips. And it’s coming to you this season!
Photo by AJ Guel on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.
The National Football League (NFL) announced that in-game player tracking technology will be available for the 2014 season in 17 stadiums. Using RFID tracking chips on every player, the NFL will now be able to measure player orientation. This initiative, called “Next Generation Statistics,” will provide insights that will be available primarily on Thursday Night Football games shown on the NFL Network.
The implementation of RFID tracking chips will provide a statistical link between the players and the fans. The technology measures distance within motion-based systems. These chips will track players’ movements and positions wherever they are on the field. Talk about an interactive fan experience! This level of “Next Generation Statistics” occurs in real-time and provides a wide-range of data types which include:
· Precise positioning data
· Velocity
· Acceleration
· Run distance
· Impact measurements
This data can be collected, processed, and presented to the audience in a matter of seconds, ultimately enhancing the football experience. It makes you wonder…could this information potentially create a more perfect game of football?
The players and coaches will have the ability to see exactly what occurred in any particular play, and giving them information to make the necessary changes for improvement. No more questions about who made a mistake because information will be broken down into statistics that can be analyzed and dissected by coaches and fans alike. It will make for an exciting, interactive 2014 season for sure!
Big Data – Most Valuable Player
The NFL initiative is following both the NBA’s and NASCAR’s foray into using big data to augment the fan experience. In the case of the NFL, fans will have access to statistics previously unavailable, but also broken down in a spatially oriented way so the fan can actually understand what happened, to whom, how and where.
Converting huge volumes of collected data transforms the information into a meaningful set of numbers, revealing unexpected patterns and correlations. This provides an opportunity for fans to be more informed, as well as coaches and players who can make better decisions going forward.
However, just like any winning team, big data needs a quarterback. In this case, it would be analytics. Frequently we talk about big data as a singular “event” where data comes in and then back out as a usable source of information. However, without analytics, big data is well, just large amounts of data.
The winning team of big data and analytics has been a focus for NEC for some time. The combination helps make sense of the abundance of available data that reside within the enterprise and transforms it into trustworthy insight and advanced analytics for sustainable intelligence.
For the NFL, the use of big data and analytics will provide new perspectives from a variety of viewpoints right after the play takes place. Now, the game will be viewed from the inside out and millions of eyes will not only be watching, but they will be in on the action as well.
The technological advances of big data and analytics are providing us a more in-depth glimpse at the world we live in. Experiences that could never be fully understood before are now being displayed in detail through real-time big data and analytics.
To learn more about big data and analytics and how they can be used in your industry, check this infographic provided by NEC and Aberdeen Group – Predictive Analytics and Big Data: A Powerful Combination.
