Can We Learn Anything from Chip Tracking in All-Star Practices?
The Shrine Bowl and Senior Bowl have tracked players during practices for years. Recently, the Shrine Bowl opened this data to their public analytics competition. Can it help project draft prospects?
Is tracking practice the future of NFL analytics?
In the past, analytics enthusiasts have talked about how the future of data analysis would come from player tracking. At the moment, we’re seeing the results of that prophecy — pass rush win rate, NGS plus/minus, receiver “open rates” and more. But in many ways, we haven’t unlocked the full potential of tracking data.
The East-West Shrine Bowl and Sumer Sports have worked on expanding what tracking data can do, hoping to find ways to use on-field data to project performance from incoming rookies into the NFL. Using numerical data to project rookies has long been a problem in analytics; traditional scouting has always taken primacy, with data-oriented approaches changing things at the margins.
Sponsored by Underdog Fantasy, organized by Sumer Sports, and put on at the Shrine Bowl, the first year of the East-West Shrine Bowl x SumerSports Analytics Competition was a moderate success.
Analysts have been using the tracking data they have access to in order to better project draft outcomes, including at the all-star games and the NFL Combine. The Next Gen Stats team, for example, has used tracking data acquired during positional drills at the NFL Combine to produce a new series of metrics.
Eric Galko, the director of the East-West Shrine Game, explained why he contacted Sumer Sports to set up the analytics competition. “We used analytics when I was with the XFL, and I’ve seen the growing rise of it. [I’ve] also [seen the rise of] opportunities and the need for people to network in the industry. And then combine that with the idea that I value analytics, [but] I can’t use R or Python, so I need to have stuff dumbed down for me.”
He added, “I think a lot of NFL teams also need help in kind of translating that information too. So, I wanted to make an opportunity for those in the analyst community to show their work in front of NFL teams and present and impress NFL teams, but also meet NFL teams on their level of understanding.”
Tracking Practice
Focusing on practice metrics is relatively new in public-facing analytics. “I think there’s a larger goal with this in particular, which is like, practice is gold, and right now we’re doing very little with practice, because practice is the most confidential, secretive thing that is out there for teams, right?” said Sam Bruchhaus, lead NFL analyst and senior data scientist at Sumer. “Unless they’re doing internal stuff, which is hard to do during the season, you’re not getting a lot of analytical juice or player development tracking out of practice.”
“I think the idea,” he said, “was that these are practices that everyone gets to see and everyone wants to see and it tells us more about college.”
“First thing, first,” Bruchhaus added, “which is why I was excited, was help us break down practice more when it comes to tracking data. We saw that, I believe, or at least, started a solution to that. And then the second thing is, let’s see how much juice this has for, you know, actually getting a beat on these players in a world where the average GM hits on 45% of his picks, if we can get that number up to 47% because we’re tracking this better, that’s 2% better we got with data.”
Like anything else, there’s more at play here than simply providing a service to the NFL community and the analysts who work in it. The Shrine Bowl asked contestants to produce analyses validating data from the Shrine Bowl to demonstrate the value of Shrine Bowl play.
The more that they can prove that they provide unique value versus other all-star games, the more they can push more players to attend the Shrine Game versus other bowl events. There are multiple elements involved here; a successful analytics competition that places analysts with football teams draws general managers in and keeps them in Frisco.
