Tracking mobile assets can be challenging. But pinpointing the locations of high-value assets moving at speeds exceeding 20 miles per hour can be daunting—especially when those “assets” have two legs each and travel in tight formations. That’s why the National Football League adopted Zebra Technologies‘ Sports Solution to monitor players, and installed the real-time location system (RTLS) at 17 stadiums during the 2014 season.
A total of 2,358 NFL players were tagged and tracked during games and training this past season. Each player had a quarter-size battery-powered RFID tag placed in each shoulder pad. The tag uses an ultrawide-band (UWB) signal to transmit its ID more than a dozen times a second to RFID readers. At each participating stadium, an average of 20 readers were mounted between the upper and lower decks. During a game, the readers captured tag data from all 22 players on the field, identifying their locations accurately and precisely, within inches.
Zebra’s software pinpoints a player’s position and clocks his speed, acceleration and distance traveled in real time. Algorithms aggregate players’ statistics from the data and display them on analytics software, to provide context.
The RFID RTLS is delivering what the NFL and Zebra call “next-generation statistics.” More than 100 million fans, including viewers of CBS Sports’ Thursday Night Football TV lineup, saw Zebra-powered graphics and data in 2014.
“It makes my job a lot easier,” says Marshall Faulk, Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee and Thursday Night Football analyst. “The stats provide a better way of looking at the game, of analyzing the game, so I can tell you who has a better chance of winning, who’s wearing down, what players are performing at a higher rate than others,” Faulk says. “It makes me look smart!”
When you watch one player pursuing another on the field, Faulk says, “you don’t know if one is slowing down or one is speeding up. Most of the time, the guy behind—he is not slowing, he is trying to catch him. The guy in front is faster and you get upset because you think he’s slowing down. We get to know now that the guy in front, he’s just faster. So now you don’t have to yell at the TV, or break your TV, thinking your favorite cornerback was dogging it.”
The Sports Solution is also delivering unexpected benefits. “In the NFL, the most important assets are the athletes,” says Eric Petrosinelli, Zebra’s general manager of sports. One team that piloted the solution found a way to use it to protect those assets from injuries, Petrosinelli says. “We analyzed data for a particular club over the course of a two-week sequence of practices for two years consecutively,” he says. “And what we found in year one was that they were getting peak injuries when they returned from their off day. So we worked with them to adjust their practices for the next season, where they lightened the load on the day returning from the off day. They reduced their injuries by 40 percent.”
The NFL plans to deploy the solution at the remaining 14 stadiums. That will “dimensionalize the game in a new way that’s going to enhance the fans’ experience and understanding, and make football more sticky than it is, which we already know has a very avid and large fan base in this country,” Petrosinelli says. Zebra expects to evolve its UWB RTLS technology in the coming years, and expand its reach into other professional and amateur sports.
Meanwhile, football fans in other industries have been impressed by what Zebra’s technology can do on the gridiron. Boeing, for example, was inspired to employ the UWB tags and readers to track workers painting airplanes and ensure they are properly harnessed. By continuously tracking the locations of workers standing on moving platforms high above the ground, the system verifies that they are complying with Boeing’s safety policy, and it automatically stops the platforms in the event that a noncompliant condition exists.