NFL launches new stats page tracking league and team trends

The NFL has been tracking all sorts of statistics and trends for about a decade through its Next Gen Stats. Making it easier to understand for casual fans is the next step.

The NFL launched a new statistics page on its website on Thursday called Next Gen Trends that takes all of the raw tracking data gathered by the league and AWS and turns it into a tool that shows how tendencies and formations have evolved throughout the league and creates a “strategic fingerprint” for every team.

“We’ve had and created so many different stats over the years. What we haven’t necessarily done for the fans at home is present it in the most digestible way possible,” said Mike Band, the NFL’s senior manager of Next Gen Stats research and analytics.

“We really want to create a tool that is data-vis driven, that is free to fans, and that is approachable so that you don’t have to be an expert statistician or an expert analyst to understand what is being presented in this tool.”

There are two main parts to the tool with a league-wide overview and then individual team pages that take a deeper dive into all 32 teams.

The league page shows how each team has progressed over the season in terms of success on offense and defense measured by Expected Points Added and how that has impacted playoff probability with a page showing the leverage of each game for the coming week.

That shows one of the most crucial games this week is the NFC North showdown between Minnesota and Green Bay with the Vikings probability of making the playoffs starting at 73% and going to 88% with a win and 64% with a loss, while the Packers start at 62% and go to 73% with a win and 43% with a loss.

The site also shows how league-wide trends have changed like how the use of motion has gone from 46% of plays in 2018 to 65% this season, as well as the rapid increase in three tight end formations and the corresponding decrease in three-receiver sets.

It also displays the stats in a quadrant that shows which teams employ strategies most and least often and which are the most and least successful. The San Francisco 49ers, for example, use motion at a league-high rate of 77% and are the most effective offense with motion, while the Pittsburgh Steelers are at a league-low 51% motion usage and are near the bottom in effectiveness.

Fans can get a deeper dive into individual teams showing how they rank in various categories on offense and defense to the rest of the league.

Minnesota's defense under coordinator Brian Flores offers a great example in one simple graphic.

“They’re outliers in a ton of things," Band said. “They run base more than anyone, they blitz more than anyone and they run split safety the second highest rate. They’re zone heavy and they generate pressure no matter with or without the blitz. I got that in a few seconds.”

The pages also include key changes teams have made in coaching and personnel since 2022 that could impact how the team has evolved and which teams are most similar on offense or defense.

The goal of the site, according to Band, is “creating simplicity out of complexity.”

“There’s always potential for diving deeper into the pool,” he said. “We want to create these rabbit hole experiences that even though they’re two pages or maybe 33 pages, if you want to count every team, the ability to continuously find new things is the goal of this experience. You don’t have to be an expert analyst to digest it and take away the key insights from the database.”

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