The state of NFL analytics: It's more than going for it on 4th down
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 July 2023
⏱️ 63 minutes
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Summary
Analytics departments across the NFL have moved way beyond, "So, should we go for it on fourth down this time?" But where exactly are they, and where are they headed? Robert Mays and Sam Schwartzstein, analytics expert for Amazon's NFL broadcasts, dive into those questions on this episode of The Athletic Football Show.
Follow Robert on Twitter: @robertmays
Follow Sam on Twitter: @schwartzsteins
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Change isn't coming. It's already here. Commerce is going digital and tax complexity is multiplying. |
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| 0:47.7 | Welcome to the athletic football show. |
| 0:50.1 | I'm Robert Mays, cool show for you guys today. |
| 0:52.4 | When I was thinking about some of the discussions |
| 0:54.3 | I wanted to have before we really got into the meat of the season, before training camp started |
| 0:58.1 | and your life just gets taken away from you in a good way. And you have a little bit more |
| 1:01.9 | perspective. Five years ago, it just felt like we were having so many discussions about the state |
| 1:07.6 | of analytics in the NFL and what was possible. And I think that's for a few different reasons. |
| 1:11.4 | The tracking data became available in 2019 or so, and it became a huge point of discussion, |
| 1:16.4 | how teams were going to use this, what was going to be doable within these buildings, |
| 1:19.9 | how science fictiony was all of this going to eventually get. |
| 1:23.1 | And that's also when we started seeing, quote-unquote unquote analytics people becoming the heads of certain |
| 1:29.6 | personnel department sashi brown took over the browns obviously we have a couple other examples of |
| 1:34.5 | that since then but over the last four or five years it feels like the state of analytics in the |
| 1:40.4 | NFL has become more and more of a black box and it's become less less of a discussion point. A lot of our conversations around analytics, quote unquote, in professional football |
| 1:48.5 | are now about fourth down decision making. They're about stringing up coaches in the public square |
| 1:52.7 | when they do or do not go forward on fourth down. And before we got into this season, I kind of |
| 1:57.7 | wanted to take a step back and just do a state of analytics discussion |
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