When taking a look through the history of analytics in sports, the NFL has been relatively absent from the picture considering the fact that they are the largest sports league in America. The MLB is likely the first to come to mind, more specifically the extremely analytical approach of Billy Beane when he was managing the Oakland A's, as was depicted in Moneyball, followed closely by the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, with their tech-entrepreneur owner, Mark Cuban. However, since partnering with Zebra Technologies back in 2014, the NFL has been on a mission to not only catch up to the analytic capabilities of their rivaling sports leagues, but surpass them, and now they may have just collected the resources to do so.
If you have been a long time NFL fan, I'm sure you remember the days when the most analysis of a play you would get was a commentator drawing messy routes in yellow on top of the screen. This technique, being tracked back to John Madden himself, has been in use by the NFL for over 30 years, and has not changed much since its origin. However, since their partnership with Zebra Technologies, the NFL has been working to implement RFID chips into the gear of every player in order to obtain data down to the inch of player and ball movements. This along with their recent partnership with AWS's machine learning services has allowed the NFL to catch up with other sports leagues in the availability of analytical data and predictions known as Next Gen Stats, allowing fans the luxury of having an in-depth analysis of every route, run, or catch made by their favorite team or players.
Zebra Technologies' patent activity probably helped land the NFL contract. Starting in July 2013, Zebra filed at least 19 patent applications before July 2014, when the deal was announced. Of these, 12 issued as patents before the deal was announced. Considering Zebra Technologies already had existing RFID-based solutions meant for different applications, it was relatively easy for them to explode in patent activity as soon as they determined there was room for them in the sector. Now, following this boom in the patent activity of Zebra Technologies in 2013/2015, they completely saturate that category of the radian, a quality that has most likely allowed them to continue their partnership with the NFL with little to no sign of competition. It is likely that their attentiveness to patent activity as well as an opportunistic outlook on the booming industry of Sports Analytics allowed Zebra Technologies to stay ahead of their competition and land a major long-term partnership that has generated them billions in revenue.
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