Inside the architecture: How the NFL delivers player performance insights at scale using Amazon QuickSight

Every year, the National Football League (NFL) Scouting Combine brings together hundreds of the most promising college football prospects to showcase their abilities through a series of physical and mental tests. While individual drill results—like 40-yard dash times or bench press repetitions—provide valuable data points, synthesizing this information into actionable insights presents a significant challenge.

To interpret data captured at the Combine, the NFL Next Gen Stats (NGS) team developed Draft Score, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Draft Score incorporates real-time football performance data, historical comparisons, and position-specific benchmarks to create player ratings ranging from 50 to 99. These ratings specifically measure player athleticism and analyze how those attributes will contribute to their potential success in the NFL, providing a sophisticated complement to traditional prospect evaluation methods. However, making this complex data accessible and meaningful to NFL clubs and millions of fans requires new visualization capabilities at massive scale.

Enter Amazon QuickSight, an AI-powered business intelligence service that empowers users to make better decisions, faster. Using a combination of advanced visualization capabilities and serverless architecture, the NFL and AWS developed Combine IQ, a dynamic dashboard that transforms raw Combine data into intuitive, interactive visualizations accessible to fans worldwide. This system handles hundreds of thousands of concurrent users while updating in near real time as new Combine data streams in. Let’s explore the key components that make this dashboard possible.

“The Combine IQ dashboard represents a quantum leap in how we share NFL Combine data with fans and analysts,” explains Mike Band, who leads the NFL’s Next Gen Stats analytics team. “For the first time, we’re able to provide real-time insights that previously were only available to professional scouts and team personnel. Imagine watching a defensive back complete the 40-yard dash, and instantly seeing how his acceleration compares to every NFL starter at his position. That’s the power we’re putting in fans’ hands.”

Highcharts integration: Pushing the boundaries of data visualization

At the heart of Combine IQ dashboard from Next Gen Stats lies the ability of QuickSight to create custom visualizations using the Highcharts library. Highcharts is a powerful visualization library that enables creation of highly customized, interactive data presentations.

Traditional business intelligence dashboards are often limited in the ability to present extensive, and sometimes complex, sports performance data in an engaging, accessible way. The NGS Combine IQ dashboard overcomes this constraint through several innovative features:

1. Dynamic player visualization: Rather than display abstract data points, the dashboard incorporates player headshots directly into visualizations. This creates immediate visual recognition, allowing users to connect performance metrics with specific athletes.
2. Position-specific context: Different NFL positions require different skill sets. The dashboard dynamically adjusts its metrics and visualization context based on the selected position group. For example, selecting “Edge Rusher” automatically surfaces relevant metrics like burst speed and bend angle, while “Wide Receiver” emphasizes route-running efficiency and catch radius.
3. Interactive player comparisons: Users can select multiple players for side-by-side comparison, with visualizations automatically adjusting to highlight key differences in performance metrics. This feature transforms complex statistical comparisons into intuitive visual narratives.

In addition to producing intuitive and interactive visualizations, QuickSight excelled in delivering the dashboard to hundreds of thousands of fans concurrently. The development team created custom visualization types that blend infographic-style presentation with machine learning-based analytics, making complex statistical concepts accessible to casual fans while maintaining depth for professional scouts.

Serverless scale: Handling game-day traffic

While the ability to visualize complex data clearly is impressive, another technical challenge lies in delivering interactive dashboards to hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. The NFL Combine attracts massive audience engagement, with fans all over the world eagerly tracking their favorite prospects’ performances in near real time. To reflect the action on the field reliably to fans around the world, the system leverages QuickSight’s serverless architecture to scale efficiently, as well as:

1. SPICE: Despite the relatively modest dataset size (approximately 10,000 records), the system needs to handle an enormous number of concurrent queries. SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine) enables rapid data retrieval and calculation, even as the user base scales up.
2. Real-time updates: Combine data updates every five minutes as new drill results come in and are verified by Next Gen Stats data analysts. This presents a caching challenge, as each update invalidates previous result sets. The system uses QuickSight incremental refresh capabilities to efficiently update only changed data points while maintaining performance.
3. Public embedding: The dashboard is embedded directly into the NFL’s website using QuickSight’s public embedding feature. This one-step embedding solution eliminates the need for complex user authentication or session management, while still preserving enterprise-grade security and performance.

Data pipeline: From Combine to dashboard

Behind the scenes, a sophisticated data pipeline transforms raw Combine measurements into the visualizations fans see. As players perform drills, biometric sensors collect data points at extremely granular intervals (every tenth of a second). This raw data flows into AWS for initial processing.

The NFL’s Next Gen Stats team uses this raw data to calculate Draft Scores and other complex metrics using machine learning models. These processed statistics are then formatted and loaded into SPICE, the robust in-memory engine that QuickSight uses to optimize data for rapid querying and visualization. An automated pipeline refreshes the SPICE dataset every five minutes, ensuring fans see the latest Combine results with minimal delay.

Beyond the Combine: Enterprise applications

The NGS Combine IQ visualization system represents a significant advancement in making complex sports analytics accessible to broad audiences. By combining powerful visualization capabilities with the serverless architecture available with QuickSight, the NFL created a system that not only handles massive scale but also transforms complex data into an engaging and intuitive visual experience for fans.

The Combine IQ visualization system also opens up exciting possibilities for additional development. Future versions could incorporate Amazon Q in QuickSight, allowing users to ask natural language questions about Combine performance and receive context-rich answers and visuals. Using AI-powered dashboard authoring capabilities could enable even more sophisticated visualizations and user interactions. The system could also be extended to incorporate historical Combine data, allowing for year-over-year comparisons and trend analysis.

For developers and organizations looking to help users access and analyze data to make better decisions, this project demonstrates the potential of modern cloud-based analytics platforms to deliver meaningful insights at scale. Whether presenting sports statistics, business metrics, or any other complex dataset, the techniques and technologies showcased in the Combine IQ visualization system provide a valuable blueprint for success.

To explore the NGS Combine IQ dashboard, analyze player performance, and evaluate the next generation of NFL talent, visit https://www.nfl.com/combine/iq.