NEW YORK — After the New Orleans Saints became the first NFL team to use Zebra Technology’s radio-based tracking system during practices, the players became “very aware that they’re being tracked,” said former wide receiver Marques Colston.
“We all knew we had an RFID tag in our shoulder pads,” he said on a panel during SportTechie’s State of the Industry event. “Some of us would make little jokes around, even when you’re not on the field, just kind of staying active and moving around to make sure that load stays up.”
Colston last played in 2015, capping a 10-year career with the Saints, and has since become an adviser to and investor in sports technologies. He’s gained an understanding of just how much more advanced the wearable landscape has gotten in the time.
Zebra is in the midst of a five-year deal with the NFL to embed its RFID tags in every player’s shoulder pads for all games, with each team’s own tracking data distributed to the coaching staff and some of the information broadcast during games or tabulated online under Next Gen Stats branding. But how does this information actually get used?
“I’ve heard that at least 30 of the 32 teams have no idea what to do with it, and the coaches basically ignore it and it’s kind of a running joke among the players,” president of NFL Players Inc., Ahmad Nassar, said. “That is potentially a gold mine, but nobody really knows yet.”
Nassar emphasized that there is a great opportunity with the data, including benefitting the players from a health and wellness standpoint — lengthening careers and improving post-football quality of life, for example. Maximizing the value extrapolated from that data, he said, should be the real priority.
From his experience with the Saints, Colston said the data was primarily used to gauge training workload and effort.
“We used it at that point at a really high level, just in terms of trying to manage load,” Colston said. “We really didn’t have a ton of data to really get into the prescriptive side of it, but as we’re moving forward, I think there’s a ton of interest around it at all levels, from management and the coaches all the way down to the players.”
Such input information was valuable, much more so than output data like how fast he was running during, say, his 27-yard catch in 2010’s Super Bowl XLIV — “not fast enough because I didn’t score,” Colston said with a laugh.
“I think, from a player perspective, the data points that would have helped me to manage my body a little bit better, so not necessarily the endpoints — speed, change of direction — those were kind of secondary,” he added. “The ability to manage load and objectively know really more so in a training setting what effects were being had on my body and being able to manage that on the front end as opposed to always depending on the feel and more subjective cues to tailor your training.”
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Nassar calls such metrics as speed and distance run “vanity metrics” that might be interesting “maybe, at best, on a broadcast level.” He engineered the NFL Players Association’s partnership with Whoop in which every player is given a wrist wearable with full ownership of his own data. Whoop, Nassar said, focuses on the same inputs Colston discussed, which is especially important given the length of the NFL’s offseason.
“What drew us to Whoop in the first place was the fact that they were really fixated on what we viewed as the things that mattered — rest and recovery, strain, how to optimize workouts for each day and calibrate especially during that offseason time when players [train where it is] not as regimented during the season, for example, or during training camp,” Nassar said, noting that the collected data “could be interesting and valuable.”
As for the Zebra game data that gets broadcast during NFL games, Nassar said too much veers toward “gimmicky random factoid” and what’s important is to “translate data into something that helps tell the story in a way that doesn’t complicate the story.”
Sportradar became the NFL’s exclusive distributor of comprehensive statistics to digital outlets before the 2015 season and has been actively working to improve the storytelling around tracking data and, in particular, the Next Gen Stats. Sportradar acquired Mocap Analytics last year to tap into the company’s machine learning and artificial intelligence technology to analyze and present helpful information.
“The next question is, how do we create context around this? What does it mean in the bigger picture?” Sportradar product manager Per Von Rosen said, adding: “With the machine learning and AI that is now coming forth, we can start processing the data and tell the stories better.”