EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — It was just the play that took the wind out of the New York Giants’ sails in their Monday night game against the Detroit Lions at MetLife Stadium.
Rookie Jamal Agnew fielded a punt less than a minute into the fourth quarter, dodged seven Giants players and ran what was called as an 88-yard return to give the Lions a two-touchdown lead over the Giants, which they maintained through the end of the game.
The play had ESPN Monday Night Football analyst and former coach Jon Gruden commenting, “you won’t see a punt return this good for awhile,” and headlines Tuesday morning splashing the 88-yard statistic as the catalyst that caused the Lions to clinch their second win of the season.
Behind the scenes — far out of sight of the cheering Lions fans and the bewildered Giants fans — a team of Zebra Technologies employees used data collected from chips inside the ball and inside Agnew’s shoulder pads to figure out exactly how far he ran to make the touchdown: 30 more yards than he was credited with.
Traditional statistics show that Agnew scored a touchdown on an 88-yard punt return, said John Pollard, Zebra’s vice president of sports business development. But with NFL’s Next Gen Stats enabled by Zebra’s player-tracking technology, the Zebra team found that Agnew actually ran a total of 119.1 yards in the process of returning the punt into the endzone. The total yards recorded made it the “longest play” recorded so far this season across the league.
The chips also showed that Agnew hit a top speed of 19.65 miles per hour during the return.
HE. COULD. GO. ALL. THE. WAY.
Rookie @jamalagnew goes 88 yards on the punt return TD! #OnePride #DETvsNYG pic.twitter.com/Qj9waGRlBD
— NFL (@NFL) September 19, 2017
Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!
The partnership between the NFL and Zebra, now in its fourth full season, began when Zebra began embedding lightweight chips inside the shoulder pads of uniformed players. The chips were expanded to every uniformed player across the league to track gameday data and fuel the NFL’s Next-Gen stats.
Now, those chips are also embedded in the practice jerseys of a third of NFL teams, including those of the Los Angeles Rams and New Orleans Saints, which use Zebra’s player-tracking technology to manage players, make determinations about their level of fatigue and potential for injury, and compare and contrast practice and game-day performance.
Last season, Zebra began experimenting with chips in Wilson footballs for Thursday Night Football and preseason games. Earlier this month, it solidified its partnership by announcing that every ball in every game this NFL season would be tracked with Zebra chips, bringing the total count of Zebra chips in the league to more than 11,000.
Right now, all of this is one giant effort by the NFL to better narrate a game for fans on stadium video boards, on its Next-Gen stats site, which it can use to drive social media engagement, and to bolster the storytelling capabilities of broadcasters, which are fed contextual data within seconds of play.
“The NFL has been happy with the seamlessness of it, with the efficiency and accuracy,” Pollard said. “It’s a new source of content in terms of adding dimensionality (to the game).”
Eli Manning #NextGenStats passing chart.
11.2 average intended air yards on attempts
7.5 average air yards on completions pic.twitter.com/09kjYR3C0h— Matt Harmon (@MattHarmon_BYB) September 19, 2017
But over time, it’s easy to see how this partnership could evolve to enhance the game in other ways, either by providing information that might help fantasy players (or sports betters if ever legalized) with their picks, or by one day serving as a backup to the human officials akin to video replay.
It’s also easy to imagine how software such as this that analyzes trend data from games and practices might also help teams and players better perform. Location data, for example, could help determine where a receiver as a higher rate of success. Tracking data could also help with advanced scouting.
Zebra already has the infrastructure installed to be able to do such things. At every stadium where the NFL plays, there are 18 to 22 beacons permanently installed on the ring of the building pointing down to the field. The receivers are fed information about speed, location and position from chips in jersey and balls at a rate of 25-pings-per-second.
The chips have a six-inch accuracy rate, which means they can’t be used reliably right now as a tool to determine if, say, Agnew stepped out of bounds during his punt return. But John Bacon, Director of Operations for Zebra Sports, says he believes they’ll become more precise over the next few seasons.
Zebra won’t speculate about how the NFL might use its technology in the future. Its partnership with the league runs through the 2018 regular season, which includes the 2019 Super Bowl in Atlanta. It is currently actively negotiating terms of their partnership to determine if it will expand beyond that.
But Bacon and Pollard seem adamant Zebra’s partnership will continue beyond 2019, and with it a host of not-yet-imagined ways its tracking technology will enhance the game.