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NFL announces fourth annual Big Data Bowl powered by AWS

This October, the NFL launched its fourth annual Big Data Bowl powered by Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), a crowd-sourcing competition designed to engage and empower the football analytics community to drive innovation, create new insights and make the game more exciting for fans.

Participants will compete for $100,000 in prize money.

“We are extremely proud of the innovative ways the NFL and our partners continue to use data and analytics to advance our game, and the success of the Big Data Bowl is an important part of this evolution,” said NFL Senior Director of Football Data and Analytics, Michael Lopez.

“Since its inception, our annual crowd-sourcing contest has connected us with talented individuals around the world and enabled us to create a pipeline of jobs across the NFL and beyond. This talent pool is spurring innovation and ensuring an even brighter future for the league, teams and players.”

According to the NFL, interested participants can sign up for the 2022 Big Data Bowl at Kaggle.com. Entrants can also work independently or form teams with other colleagues, and there is a submission track open exclusively to college students. The date for submission of the project is January 6, 2022.

After the submission date of the project, Big Data Bowl entries will also be judged by data analysts from NFL clubs. Finalists will be announced in early 2022 and will share a prize of $100,000 provided by AWS.

Using Next Gen Stats powered by AWS, the 2022 Big Data Bowl called on professional and aspiring data analysts to devise innovative approaches to analyzing special teams in the NFL.

Participants will have access to three years of special teams’ data and are challenged to identify what strategies and players make for a successful punt, kickoff, field goal and extra point play.

Using this real-time data across a wide variety of players, plays and situations, participants will propose statistical, data-driven solutions. Participants also will be able to use PFF Scouting data, which features play, player and game characteristics derived from film analyses.

Since the Big Data Bowl launched in 2018, the competition has served as a pipeline for NFL teams and vendors, as well as other leagues. To date, more than 30 Big Data Bowl participants have been hired in data and analytics roles in sports. In addition, the winning algorithm from the 2020 Big Data Bowl – expected rush yards – has been adopted into the Next Gen Stats suite of metrics.

“Big Data Bowl gives aspiring data scientists a platform to showcase their skills,” said Priya Ponnapalli, Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab. “We have thousands of engineers at Amazon committed to machine learning and deep learning, and it’s a big part of our heritage. Within AWS, we’ve been focused on bringing that knowledge and capability to our customers by putting machine learning into the hands of every developer and data scientist so we’re looking forward to what this new pool of talent can do.”

For the second consecutive year, the Big Data Bowl will also feature a mentorship program where a dozen junior data scientists from diverse backgrounds are paired with experienced NFL analytics experts to help curate a Big Data Bowl submission.

For additional information on the Big Data Bowl, visit: https://operations.nfl.com/the-game/big-databowl

Joseph
Joseph Phillips

Joseph Phillips is the Sports Editor for the Chicago Crusader Newspaper. He is a Chicago native, who has been a sports writer for over 17 years. He also hosts the SC Media News and Sports Network Q&A radio show on WHPK 88.5 FM Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

Sports Editor at Chicago Crusader Newspaper | + posts

Joseph Phillips is the Sports Editor for the Chicago Crusader Newspaper. He is a Chicago native, who has been a sports writer for over 17 years. He also hosts the SC Media News and Sports Network Q&A radio show on WHPK 88.5 FM Chicago.

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