In the world of professional sports, “data-driven” is often a term tossed around to describe basic box scores. But for the National Football League, the last 10 years have represented a fundamental shift in how the game is measured, analyzed and even played.
This week, as the league reflects on a decade of its Next Gen Stats or NGS platform, the story isn’t just about football — it’s an excellent example of how cloud-native infrastructure and machine learning can transform an industry in real time.
What began in 2015 as a tentative experiment with radio-frequency identification or RFID tags has flourished into an artificial intelligence-led set of experiments and decisions fueled by Amazon Web Services Inc. Today, the partnership between the NFL and AWS serves as a model for the “intelligent enterprise,” processing millions of data points per game to deliver insights that were once considered impossible to quantify.
The origin: From tracking to intelligence
A…
