AWS Powers NFL’s Next Gen Superbowl Stats

This Sunday’s 54th National Football League Superbowl will pit the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers in Miami. With offices in Kansas City and San Francisco, this match-up has extra significance for Team Foghorn. We have even created a friendly wager. If the 49ers reign victorious the KC Foghorn Crew, will be shipping KC’s famous Jack Stack BBQ and famous sauce out to San Francisco. If the Chiefs raise the Lombardi trophy over their heads the SF office we will be delivering Boudin sourdough soup bowls and Ghirardelli chocolates.

While we will all be enjoying the game, AWS’s servers will be working at lightspeed to make the game more exciting and safe. The NFL’s partnership with AWS is enhancing the game for the fans and the players. As with all aspects of modern life the cloud has made the NFL more agile, and able to deliver data that is more immediate and meaningful. From sensors on players to AWS’s machine learning the NFL is transforming itself for the better with the assistance of AWS.

The NFL’s Next Gen Stats deliver exciting real-time data that give each action on the field more context and meaning. Rfid sensors are placed on the players and the ball that enable the capture of thousands of data points. This data is digested instantaneously via machine learning models on Amazon SageMaker where a player’s speed, field location and movement patterns is available for broadcast analysis, scouting, and next level coaching.

At AWS’s 2019 re:Invent conference this past fall in Las Vegas, NFL commissioner Roger Goodel joined AWS CEO Andy Jassy to announce a new initiative to utilize the transformative powers of AWS’s machine learning technology to further reduce the amount of head injuries that NFL players have historically suffered.

With data easily accessed from the NFL’s AWS Data Lake, they are discovering actionable insights via AWS SageMaker toolset. Using simulations based on decades of game film, they hope to recognize patterns that would inform who is getting hurt and how. This data will inspire new rules to minimize impacts to the head. Armed with digested data, the NFL is inspiring helmet manufacturers to build next generation gear that will protect players more effectively.

Cloud computing and AWS are making the NFL and this Superbowl more engaging and safer. For a league that is 100 years old, this is an inspiring evolution. No matter the outcome of this Sunday’s historic game we hope it is without injury and full of fun commercials. We will all be admiring the speed of which the Next Gen Stats are delivered. And as a Chiefs fan I hope the KC Foghorn crew enjoys that warm taste of victory delivered in a bread bowl.