How the NFL and AWS Reimagined the Combine and Draft Experience for Fans

The NFL is committed to delivering new and innovative experiences that keep fans connected to the game year-round. Whether it’s the excitement of game day, the intensity of the NFL Scouting Combine, or the drama of the NFL Draft, the league is constantly exploring ways for fans to engage and experience the game they love, powered by data.

Historically, fans interested in the outcome of the Combine and Draft could follow the action on NFL.com, but only through static trackers that listed results after they happened. “What we lacked was a rich, analytically driven experience where fans could interact with the data themselves—whether that’s understanding player performance or getting a glimpse into their team’s draft strategy,” said Mike Band, senior manager for NFL Next Gen Stats Research & Analytics.

Bridging that gap meant finding a way to transform internal-facing data and models into an interactive, near real-time dashboard for fans—in the limited time left before these critical off-season events.

Since 2017, AWS has worked with the NFL to power the league’s Next Gen Stats program, which collects over 500 million data points each season. Mike and his colleagues turned to the Amazon QuickSight team to bring data-driven insights on player performance to internal stakeholders and media partners through intuitive, interactive dashboards. “We realized we could leverage our expertise with QuickSight—and our strong relationship with AWS—to build similar dashboards for fans,” said Band.

After only six weeks of development, the team successfully launched the Combine IQ dashboard, which used QuickSight to give fans access to the same advanced data and analytics capabilities that teams and analysts rely on to better understand athlete performance. “Once the Combine was over, we had a meeting where we asked, ‘Can we do this for the Draft?’ Our AWS partners said we could, and that’s what led to the development of Draft IQ in less thanthree weeks,” Band said.

Like Combine IQ, Draft IQ uses Amazon QuickSight to deliver interactive insights, predictions, and draft updates to fans in an easy-to-use dashboard. With Draft IQ, fans can explore personalized, team-specific draft boards, trade probabilities, and pick tracking. To deliver insights to fans, AWS Lambda functions continuously ingest live draft data, which is stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). QuickSight integrates directly with Amazon S3, ensuring timely updates as picks are made. The data is cached and queried using SPICE, QuickSight’s Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine. SPICE played a critical role during the live Draft, enabling updates every three minutes without placing any load on the NFL’s backend systems. To help meet the tight timeframe without burdening developers, the team relied on QuickSight’s one-click embedding capability, which allowed the dashboard to be directly integrated into NFL.com.

In the final days before the Draft, the NFL and AWS took the Draft IQ experience a step further by adding Draft IQ Assistant, the league’s first public-facing chatbot, powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI). Built using Amazon Q Business, the assistant allows fans to ask complex draft questions using natural language and receive conversational, data-backed answers. The team trained the model on NFL-specific language—position abbreviations like QB and CB, draft terminology such as “trade up” or “on the clock,” and team-specific draft logic—so that the assistant could accurately interpret and respond to fan queries.

Thanks to this level of governance—and the league’s longstanding relationship with AWS—the NFL’s internal AI governance group approved the project in record time. “To go from approval of bringing in AI to our NFL platforms through training the model, loading the data, and building the UI—there were all these little hoops we had to jump through to make it possible,” said Band. “And yet we were able to do it with agility and speed. Looking back, I’m very impressed.”

Throughout the four action-packed days of the Combine and seven rounds of the Draft, these tools exceeded expectations, serving over 1 million total visitors, supporting tens of thousands of concurrent queries, and receiving rave reviews from fans. NFL analysts Mina Kimes, Dan Orlovsky, and Benjamin Solak of ESPN even integrated Draft IQ into their pre-draft coverage to break down player fits, trade scenarios, and team strategies.

Looking ahead, the NFL sees these experiences as the foundation for continued innovation, enabled by the league’s close partnership with AWS. The Next Gen Stats team is currently exploring how Amazon QuickSight dashboards and Amazon Q Business could be used to deliver new kinds of fan experiences across events. "It feels like we’re creating new traditions and experiences for fans with the help of data and AI,” Band said. “This project is exactly what we’ve always tried to do with Next Gen Stats—elevate the fan’s understanding of the awesome game of football.”