Since Super Bowl LIX (59) is coming up this Sunday, February 9, 2025, I feel it's fitting to talk about a new use of artificial intelligence and computer vision that's making its way into the sports world.
ShotQuality, a company that extracts sports data for basketball, and Field Vision, a football analytics company that provides data analysis products for fans, football teams, analysts, and betters, have created Drive Quality, an application that's a real-time metric that quantifies offensive performance. Shot Quality's computer vision data extraction and Field Vision's football data science combine to deliver live insights and projections at an unprecedented level of granularity to fans, sports betters, and sportsbooks.
Scott Bouska, the founder of Field Vision Sports, found himself needing data on how open a receiver was, yards before contact for a running back, and pocket conditions for a quarterback live during a game. Since that game, he found himself searching for a way to get a real-time analysis for predicting offensive success.
Bouska learned of Shot Quality and its platform but the company was only in the world of basketball, where it was extracting similar spatial data, at scale, live from video.
When the two companies put their expertise together, they created Drive Quality which predicts expected points per play & success rate, pocket quality which predicts the time and space for a quarterback to throw, catch quality which predicts receiver separation before a catch, rush quality which predicts the yards gained before first contact, and block quality which predicts the movement and control over the line of scrimmage.
Football metrics are traditionally reactive, only being able to compile data after plays and game wins or losses. Since I'm unfamiliar with current sports betting processes and technologies, I did a bit of research to see how new this approach is, and what I found is that advanced sports data technologies have been developing for years to provide granular insights. Professional sports analytics firms and major sports networks like NFL Next Gen Stats have been using similar computer vision and machine learning technologies since around 2016-2017. So while it's not necessarily revolutionary, the specific combination of metrics providing real-time analysis (pocket quality, catch quality, rush quality, and block quality) by using live spatial data extraction is novel.
While Drive Quality will likely be a big boost for sports betters and fantasy footballers, this new application offers a huge benefit to football teams to better analyze their players and plays, and better insight into if they will succeed or not, during a live game. For example, live spatial data could help teams optimize player positioning, game planning, and in-game adjustments more effectively than traditional metrics.
