How quickly did the receiver accelerate? What was his top-end speed? How far did he run and how much separation did he really get against the defensive back?
Clearer answers than ever before are coming to your TV screen this fall and it's only the beginning of the NFL's foray into player tracking and advanced statistics that could change the way fans, and even teams, look at what happens on the field.
Every NFL player will wear two tiny sensors in his shoulder pads this season in the first "live" phase of a project the league hopes will enhance the in-stadium experience as well, with further media expansion and integration with teams' existing training technology likely down the line.
"What you're going to see is touchpoints that happen throughout the league," Vishal Shah, the NFL's vice president of domestic media and business development, told USA TODAY Sports.
"Certainly, the most comprehensive and impactful might be to the fans themselves. But it's going to touch areas of our league and give us a deeper understanding of our game."
The NFL partnered with Zebra Technologies, which is applying the same radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology that it has used the past 15 years to monitor everything from supplies on automotive assembly lines to dairy cows' milk production.
Work is underway to install receivers in 17 NFL stadiums, each connected with cables to a hub and server that logs players' locations in real time. In less than a second, the server can spit out data that can be enhanced graphically for TV broadcasts with the press of a button.
If a player finds another gear in the fourth quarter of an important game, the sensors will pick it up. And if he's running out of gas, the sensors will reveal that, too.
"For those of us that are coaches from our couches, we're like, 'Oh, come on! That guy was open!' Maybe he was and maybe he wasn't," said Jill Stelfox, general manager of Zebra's location solutions division, which produces its MotionWorks software.
"If we know closing distance of a defender and an offensive guy, you can really know whether that hit would be made or whether he really could've made that play."
TV networks have experimented in recent years with route maps and other visual enhancements of players' movements. But league-wide deployment of the sensors and all the data they produce could be the most significant innovation since the yellow first-down line.
The data also will go to the NFL "cloud," where it can be turned around in seconds for in-stadium use and, eventually, a variety of apps and other visual and second-screen experiences. Producing a set of proprietary statistics on players and teams is another goal, Shah said.
Device
One of the Zebra Technologies sensors that NFL players will wear under their shoulder pads this season is shown. The NFL is implementing the companys radio-frequency identification technology this season in 17 stadiums.(Photo: Courtesy NFL)
NFL teams many already using GPS technology to track players' movements, workload and efficiency in practice won't have access to the in-game information in 2014 because of competitive considerations while the league measures the sustainability and integrity of the data.
"But as you imagine, longer-term, that is the vision," Shah said. "Ultimately, we're going to have a whole bunch of location-based data that's coming out of live-game environment, and we want teams to be able to marry that up to what they're doing in practice facilities themselves."
