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Tackling is a fundamental defensive move in American football, with the main purpose of stopping the forward motion of the ball-carrier. However, current tackling metrics are manually recorded outcomes that are inherently flawed due to…
Pressing is a fundamental defensive strategy in football, characterized by applying pressure on the ball owning team to regain possession. Despite its significance, existing metrics for measuring pressing often lack precision or…
Defensive Pass Interference (DPI) is one of the most impactful penalties in the NFL. DPI is a spot foul, yielding an automatic first down to the team in possession. With such an influence on the game, referees have no room for a mistake. It…
Tracking data in the NFL is a sequence of spatial-temporal measurements that vary in length depending on the duration of the play. In this paper, we demonstrate how model-based curve clustering of observed player trajectories can be used to…
Player attribution in American football remains an open problem due to the complex nature of twenty-two players interacting on the field, but the granularity of player tracking data provides ample opportunity for novel approaches. In this…
Analysis of player tracking data for American football is in its infancy, since the National Football League (NFL) released its Next Gen Stats tracking data publicly for the first time in December 2018. While tracking datasets in other…
Several performance metrics for quantifying the in-game performances of individual football players have been proposed in recent years. Although the majority of the on-the-ball actions during games constitutes of passes, many of the…
American football is an increasingly popular sport, with a growing audience in many countries in the world. The most watched American football league in the world is the United States' National Football League (NFL), where every offensive…
The NFL collects detailed tracking data capturing the location of all players and the ball during each play. Although the raw form of this data is not publicly available, the NFL releases a set of aggregated statistics via their Next Gen…
Continuous-time assessments of game outcomes in sports have become increasingly common in the last decade. In American football, only discrete-time estimates of play value were possible, since the most advanced public football datasets were…
Most historical National Football League (NFL) analysis, both mainstream and academic, has relied on public, play-level data to generate team and player comparisons. Given the number of oft omitted variables that impact on-field results,…
In football, attacking teams attempt to break through the opponent's defensive line to create scoring opportunities. This action, known as a Line Break, is a critical indicator of offensive effectiveness and tactical performance, yet…
Player tracking data have provided great opportunities to generate novel insights into understudied areas of American football, such as pre-snap motion. Using a Bayesian multilevel model with heterogeneous variances, we provide an…
Evaluating offensive linemen and pass rushers at the player level is difficult because observable outcomes are sparse, opponent-dependent, and strongly shaped by surrounding context. Using 2021 regular-season Hudl tracking data, we…
We can construct passing networks when we regard a player as a node and a pass as a link in football games. Thus, we can analyze the networks by using tools developed in network science. Among various metrics characterizing a network,…
The increasing availability of spatio-temporal tracking data has created new opportunities for analysing tactical behaviour in football. However, many existing approaches evaluate passes primarily through outcome-based metrics such as…
Defensive coverage schemes in the National Football League (NFL) represent complex tactical patterns requiring coordinated assignments among defenders who must react dynamically to the offense's passing concept. This paper presents a…
American football is unique in that offensive and defensive units typically consist of separate players who don't share the field simultaneously, which tempts one to evaluate them independently. However, a team's offensive and defensive…
American football games attract significant worldwide attention every year. Identifying players from videos in each play is also essential for the indexing of player participation. Processing football game video presents great challenges…
Traditional assessments of tackling in American Football often only consider the number of tackles made, without adequately accounting for their context and importance for the game. Aiming for improvement, we develop a metric that…