Colton Schmidt of the Bills punts the ball against the Bears at New Era Field on Nov. 4, 2018. (Photo by Brett Carlsen/Getty Images)
As part of its annual 1st & Future entrepreneurial challenge, the NFL is soliciting ideas to improve player safety on punts in a new Punt Analytics Competition. The league has made available a proprietary data set including the 2016 and 2017 Next Gen Stats gleaned from Zebra Technologies’ RFID player tracking chips to help inform submissions.
The NFL revamped its kickoff rules before the current season and now is turning its attention to punts. Prior to 2018, players on kickoffs incurred concussions at a rate of five times that for runs or passes. Punts accounted for twice the concussion rate of normal plays. The league changed the required starting formations for kickoffs to reduce the distance between players, which in turn has minimized impacts.
“I don’t know what the final numbers will show from an injury perspective, but I’m optimistic that they’ll show a change,” said Falcons CEO and Competition Committee chair Rich McKay. “You’ve definitely got a different looking play and different players playing the play.”
Accounting for soft-tissue pulls and all other ailments, punts remain the most injurious play in NFL games and also the most penalized. The closely-held Zebra tracking data—which the NFL only began distributing in full to all teams this year—includes location and movement coordinates for every player on the field. Statisticians now have the opportunity to pour through that information to offer solutions.
“Whatever the crowdsourcing may bring us, if they bring us some unique and creative ideas, we’ll take it through the Competition Committee funnel, then we’ll take it through the special teams [coaches] funnel, but it does give us a way to have fans have an impact on modernization of rules, which is a good thing,” McKay said.
The Punt Analytics Competition joins the other returning 1st & Future contest, Innovations to Advance Athlete Health and Safety Competition. The pitch contest will again take place during Super Bowl weekend. This year, Arrow Electronics is the presenting sponsor, and Georgia Tech will host the event on Feb. 2, 2019, the day before Super Bowl LIII will be played across town at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The data science platform Kaggle is running the punt competition.
“Leveraging available data to analyze the game is an increasingly essential way to improve our rules and look to make the game safer,” NFL EVP of health and safety initiatives Jeff Miller said in a statement. “This is a groundbreaking new effort to ask the public to analyze our rules and make recommendations. We are excited to tap into the innovative thinking of data scientists and entrepreneurs.”
Up to four punt submissions will receive $20,000 apiece. As many as five finalists from the overall 1st & Future competition will be named in the general health and safety category, with a grand-prize winner receiving $50,000 and two Super Bowl tickets while second-place receives $20,000 and a pair of Super Bowl tickets. The overall prize pool remains $150,000; Impressio, RecoverX, and Curv.ai all were granted $50,000 at last year’s NFL 1st & Future competition.
SportTechie Takeaway
The popularity and brand of the NFL continue to attract innovative crowdsourced ideas to solve the concussion problem from researchers and companies. The Next Gen Stats collected by Zebra tracking chips have seemingly been underutilized in the past but now could drive positive change in player safety.
