Zebra Technologies and Wilson Sporting Goods announced Thursday that every NFL game football this season would have an embedded RFID tag to track location, speed and rotation metrics. Though some data points will be exclusive to teams, other statistics will be included in television broadcasts and potentially tabulated in NFL.com leaderboards.
This technology debuted at the Pro Bowl in January 2016 was deployed in the kicking balls used during Thursday Night Football games last year and in every ball throughout this summer’s preseason. The pilot was deemed a success, leading to the program’s expansion this season.
“It’s been a couple of years of an iterative process,” Zebra Technologies general manager of location solutions, Jill Stelfox, said, noting that these are the “early days” of data collection with larger samples needed to glean real insights and not just extraneous facts that might overwhelm fans.
“How can we focus on the plays when it’s both fun and important?” Stelfox added. “I think we’re in that early phase of looking at that for the ball. I do think data will get to fans soon, which will be fun.”
Zebra’s RFID tags on each player’s shoulder pads, which log movement for everyone on the field, are entering their fourth season of use. The RFID — radio-frequency identification — tags on the footballs will capture data points 25 times per second, double the rate of the player trackers because the ball will often travel at least twice as fast as anyone can run.
The tags on player pads are nine grams, or about a third of a pound, but that size affected the aerodynamics of a football. Wilson tested the balls in their lab’s wind tunnel and detected a wobble, so Zebra re-engineered the tag down to three grams, or a tenth of an ounce. The tag is the circumference of a nickel, but thinner, and placed under the laces during the manufacturing process. (When asked if the tag had any effect on the inflation of the ball — Deflategate was not that long ago — Stelfox was unequivocal, “It doesn’t in any way!”)
Stelfox credited the league for doing a good job promoting and socializing the idea with players to avoid any resistance and encourage feedback and with Wilson for collaboration.
“It was a real partnership,” she said, “even a friendship between us and Wilson.”
The Next Gen Stats derived from the shoulder pad tags — which include top speed, a receiver’s average separation from the defense, fastest sack and longest completed pass distance, among others — have been a hit and now the challenge is identifying the trends and determining the pertinent statistics to share from the balls. Will passing spin rate matter, for instance?
“We’ve worked really hard on mining what we think is some interesting data that will lead to interesting storytelling and documentation throughout the season, many of which really hasn’t been on the air thus far,” ESPN Monday Night Football producer Jay Rothman said on a conference call last week.
“There’s some things we’re going to have access to, and some things based on the competition committee we won’t, but things like release time of different quarterbacks, you know, again, I’m leading into Jon [Gruden] as our head coach and play caller some of the data that we get and some things that are of interest to him through his eyes, through his lens, through his world as a play caller and that sort of thing,” Rothman added. “We’re going to walk before we run, but I do think there’s some really, really interesting things we’re going to get both from the players and from the football, and we’re excited about that.”
Eventually there could even be game-outcome uses from the information. If a field goal attempt exceeds the height of the goalposts, perhaps the RFID location tag could be used to determine if the ball passed through the uprights. When such a hypothetical was posed to Stelfox, she stressed the importance of being sure that use of the technology works perfectly first, saying, “I think we more time to understand where it’s all going to go.”
It was only a matter of time before the tags would be included in every football. Zebra Technologies CEO Anders Gustafsson had said at the Bloomberg Breakaway Summit back in May that no technical issue held back the inclusion of RFID chips on every football, and he emphasized its helpfulness, saying, “Having that as an extra data point provided a richer set of information for the coaches and the teams.”
The statement touting the widespread use of tagged footballs made note that the New Orleans Saints are eager to use the footballs in practice as well, particularly to glean new insights about their quarterbacks and special teams.
“We use the Zebra Sports practice system to track our players and monitor their participation and performance throughout the season,” Saints coach Sean Payton said. “The information provided by Zebra has proven to be a vital asset to our staff in evaluating and training our entire squad. Adding tracking capabilities to the ball will take things to another level for us.”