Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company has become a cloud, machine learning, and artificial intelligence provider for the NFL‘s Seattle Seahawks.
The team will use AWS’ services, including compute, storage, database, analytics, and ML to drive deep analysis of game footage to inform game strategy, improve operational efficiencies, and accelerate decision-making to advance team performance game-to-game.
The Seahawks will, in turn, combine the weekly NFL Next Gen Stats player tracking data, which tracks the position of the ball and every player 10 times per second, with its own player and club data to develop custom analytics and proprietary statistics.
A data lake, being built by the team on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), will combine team stats and NFL data, such as Next Gen Stats player tracking, player health and wellness data, and scouting information to provide deeper visibility into player capabilities, as well as give the coaching staff a single, real-time view of player and team performance.
By applying AWS analytics services to the data, the Seahawks aim to quickly uncover insights to better evaluate talent and develop game plans that take advantage of the team’s strengths.
Using Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service to build, train, and deploy ML models, the Seahawks can also analyze the number of hurries, knockdowns, and sacks, to predict how specific quarterbacks will perform under pressure, as well as which defensive players will exert pressure based on the depth of throws and distance gained by a receiver after catching a pass.
Chip Suttles, Vice President, Technology, Seattle Seahawks, commented: “As our official cloud provider, AWS will enable the Seahawks to become a data-driven organization that uses the power of technology to fuel future championships.
“We chose AWS because of their relentless focus on innovation, their broad array of machine learning services, and proven experience in supporting large sports organizations and enterprises around the world at scale.”
Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS, added: “Data has become a competitive differentiator for sports franchises, but these organizations need the most complete and fully featured set of machine learning and analytics capabilities to analyze and take action upon that data to impact player performance and drive championship caliber play.”
