Tracking Data.
Positional data, sampling rates and the vendor differences nobody discloses.
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Tracking turned sport into a continuous data stream. It answers questions the box score cannot — and creates a resolution illusion, because sampling ten times a second does not mean knowing ten times as much.
What this field actually measures
- Sampling frequency
Positional readings captured per second.
ReferenceNFL Next Gen Stats uses RFID tags at roughly 10 Hz; optical systems commonly run at about 25 Hz.
- Positional accuracy
Error between recorded and true position.
ReferenceTypically reported in tens of centimetres; error grows with occlusion and crowding.
- Derived load metrics
Accelerations, decelerations, and high-speed distance computed from raw traces.
ReferenceHighly sensitive to filtering choices — vendors' numbers are not interchangeable.
Evidence & metrics
The published work behind the numbers above, and the public datasets you can open to check us. If a claim can’t be traced here, we don’t print it.
Citations
NFL Big Data Bowl technical papers
NFL Football Operations / Kaggle competition write-ups · 2019–present
Peer-reviewed-style public analyses of player tracking at 10 Hz, including their measurement error.
Validity and reliability of GPS units for measuring team-sport movement
Scott, Scott & Kelly — International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance · 2016
GPS accuracy degrades with speed and with short, sharp changes of direction; sampling rate matters.
Datasets
NFL Big Data Bowl tracking data
NFL / Kaggle · free registration
Player-level x/y/speed at 10 Hz for selected seasons.
SkillCorner open broadcast tracking
SkillCorner · free
Broadcast-derived football tracking data released openly for research.
Still open
- Which tracking-derived metrics predict outcomes rather than describe effort?
- How should teams handle vendor-to-vendor incomparability across a career?
- Who owns an athlete's positional data?
What we won’t say
We will not compare load numbers across vendors as if they were the same measurement.
- VO-1Evidence before wit
- VO-2Punch at claims, never at people
- VO-3Say the uncertainty out loud
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