by Angela Guess
Bernard Marr reports in Forbes, “This year marks the 50th year of the Super Bowl, and plenty has changed since the first time teams duked it out for the national title. Players are bigger and faster, replays more instant and from more angles, commercials cost the equivalent of a small nation’s GDP… But this year, there’s something else that has the potential to change the game: big data. Sports analysts have been collecting data on football games since the very beginning, but our data collection techniques and abilities have vastly improved. I have written before about how the NFL is using big data. New sensors in stadiums and on NFL players’ pads and helmets help collect real-time position data, show where and how far players have moved, and can even help indicate when a player may have suffered a damaging hit to the head.”
Marr goes on, “In 2013, Microsoft struck a $400 million deal with the NFL to make this data available to coaches and players via their Surface tablets. Coaches use the tablets to demonstrate and review plays on the sidelines, as well as access real-time data from the NFL’s databanks. Of course, the partnership hasn’t been all smooth. At first, commentors kept referring to the tablets as ‘iPads,’ and had to be reminded many times to call them by their brand name. Then, during the AFC championship game this year, the Patriots briefly had connectivity issues, causing the tablets to stop working. And, of course, the commentors remembered to call them by their brand name that time just as, almost as unfortunately, the network ran a Microsoft ad during the break. Still, connectivity issues aside, the advent of real-time data access is potentially changing the way coaches view games and call plays.”
photo credit: NFL