 From the SAP Center at San Jose, home of the San Jose Sharks. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HGST, Sports Data Silicon Valley. Brought to you by HGST. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at the Shark Tank. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier. I'm the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm joined by Coach Jeff Frick, General Manager at CUBE. And our next guest is Mike King with Zebra Technologies. Welcome to theCUBE. Welcome to theCUBE Tank. We have the Shark Tank behind us. Great to see you. Sports Data SV. You guys are in the middle of all the actions. Talk about some of the things you're doing and some of the things you've done because this is really, really interesting. Okay, well right now I work for Zebra Technologies and they are the official player tracking provider of the NFL. They're in the second of a five year partnership with the NFL in which we instrument every single player in the National Football League with a set of RFID pads, chips on their pads. We have tracking systems installed in all 31 venues plus Wembley plus the Pro Bowl and Aloha. We track every player in every game. We track their XY coordinate data which is actually the core and the key to all data from the game for what the NFL is actually termed next generation statistics or next gen stats. So you will now start to see those products on broadcast, on NFL.com, on a variety of platforms that the NFL started to surface that data. Fundamentally, when you do XY position tracking and we captured that information about the players about 25 times per second, we're not only able to tell you where the player is at all times, we're able to tell you their accumulated distance throughout the play, throughout the game, their speed at any given moment, their accelerations and decelerations, the direction obviously and their orientation as we're tracking both shoulders so we can tell you independently where the player's facing so if they're back pedaling, running three quarters, all sorts of information that is interesting. So it goes not only to fans and customers, it goes to coaches, it goes to general managers, it's kind of the kind of core data source for kind of opening up the world of big data. Internet of things is people too. Absolutely. And they are things on the field. It's interesting, the yellow line was an innovation, you were involved in that. Now we've evolved essentially so much data where there's a lot of implications here. This competitive player management but safety is a big one. Talk about some of those dynamics. Yeah, correct. So a lot of the impetus to getting this technology into the National Football League is it takes a step to go through the logistics of adding this and making it scalable and putting it in all the venues. These are not small undertakings, they have financial and time-based implications. So for the NFL it was driven by two things. One is always health and safety so collecting as much information as possible about the athletes, I think, highest on everybody's list is concussions and things like that. And there's independent technologies around helmet sensors and technologies to do that but understanding the event that led up to the concussion event is still very important and that our system provides that information so the acceleration and the direction right up to the moment of an impact. And so that information is shared immediately and the NFL shares that with all their medical staff right now, kind of unfiltered right out of the gate, make that advancement. Is this NFL data or is this shared data? Or is it more kind of like, let's understand it first within the NFL before we expose it, except for the situation with health and health? Yeah, exactly right. That's why I mentioned the health and safety issue. The NFL piloted this program, funded it. They are a very parody-driven league. They like for an even competitive floor. So they made this investment. They're gathering all the data. They're learning, evaluating it, validating it, making sure it's good, making sure where it matters and then kind of handing it off to the teams in small portions to allow them to, some teams may be more advanced, some teams may be a little behind in terms of understanding the data. So they control that process. The one question I wanted to ask you, I know just waiting for you to come up is, do they track the ball boys? And the deflate gate was a huge issue. I mean, this is one of those things. The refs weren't paying attention. Apparently, Tom Brady was vindicated, of course, being a Patriots fan. Those kinds of little things, I'm not obviously kidding with that, but I mean. Well, no, so outside the bands of what people might think about, we do track quite a bit of other information. Sticks and chains don't move that much, but we track them. We do track the officials and that information will never really go to the public, but it's for improving officials and giving feedback and helping them train and be better at their job as well. And hopefully as soon as the 2016 season, if not definitely in the 2017 season, all the balls will be tracked as well. So Zebra has worked very aggressively with the NFL and Wilson, the official ballmaker at the NFL to put a smaller version of our tracking tag in the ball so they can track all the balls at all times. You could do PSI, but that's not on the request list from the NFL. Basically, the ball, the chain of custody is maintained, the ball will be fine, but yes. The balls are secure with the sensors. That is the idea. Breaking news here in the queue, we're always breaking stories, you know, at NFL. One of the things we talked about in scheduling you to come on is really kind of an attitude about the data. And you talked about the NFL's collecting this data and slowly kind of trickling it out and using it as a baseline for kind of next gen applications. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to some of those early applications that are coming out. But then I think what I want to do then is shift gears and talk about MLB. I think the MLB just signed to deal with the NHL. MLB is way out in advance in terms of the leagues and a lot of the innovations they've done around digital transformation, but they've got a very different strategy. So first off, what are some of those next gen NFL things? Yeah. Stats, and then let's dig into kind of two different kind of attitudes about how we treat data. Sure. Well, most of you who are baseball fans know that baseball is a much more statistics-driven sport, that the fan base is much more, you know, you got 162 games and people score the game themselves. It's got a very different culture of football. They feel an obligation to introduce next gen stats in a methodical way to get people used to the idea as kind of a transformation of why this is different than what they're used to. Very basic stuff right now. So it'll be the maximum and average velocities of players. So you'll see speed reports. If you follow the NFL on Twitter, they will always have next gen stats content every Monday and Tuesday looking back at the weekend. Who are the top performers? They are delivering that same information about distances and speeds on the Xbox platform. There's an NFL app on Xbox and Microsoft being an official partner has kind of been the pilot generator of product content for the general public. So you can go on your Xbox and go on your NFL app anytime and you can look at plays and replay and you can see all the different next gen stats as they've chosen to surface up. It's usually skilled position players who scored on a touchdown. Interesting information. How fast did that guy really run breaking away? Like Taiwan Jones yesterday in the Raiders Jets game made a couple, broke a couple of great tackles. And then once he got into the open field, he took off. So he exceeded 20 miles per hour. Just kind of a threshold for really high speed during a football game. They do that. And then they put things on television. You'll see sometimes just pedometers or trails on players that really show the route they took and try and demonstrate the athleticism in a visual way. That's kind of neat because it's a validation of the data. It shows you if those graphics are powered by data and the player moves on the same path, the data is correct. And that's kind of Zebra's big selling point is the fact that it is real time data. It comes so fast. There's other tracking systems in sports. Soccer and basketball use camera based systems that have opened up this whole world of player movement data over the years. But that data takes up to 24 hours to post process and have corrected. It has hand scrubbing. It's got a lot of, you know, it's just not there in real time. And so the computer can track objects. It doesn't, but it loses track of who's who. Players overlap, things happen. The ball is very difficult. Somebody has to go in and scrub all that data. And so Zebra's kind of mantra is, well let's do that same thing, but in real time. What's the payoff for putting a device on someone? Pivoting over to MLB, that's very interesting. So they've been tracking pitches all the way back to 2005 with what was originally a broadcast based camera system called Pitch Effects. My old employer Sport Vision employed with them. And they made that data basically free to the public whether it was on purpose or just because they weren't protecting their, you know, web code very well. It was out there to the whole world. And they got the benefit of crowdsourced data mining and people building models and finding things. And it really kind of advanced that process just about pitch speeds and locations in a way that was, I think, if they tried to internalize it wouldn't have happened. And now baseball has moved to a much bigger world. They're tracking players now. They've instituted that in all of their venues. So they have a world of that data. If you go on MLB.com, something called StatCast. It has some cool replays, it talks about defensive range and reaction time and all these baseball people love this because they're always looking for more ways to quantify the game of baseball because there's so many repetitions. That's StatCast. That's Amazon's there on Amazon but it shows that how far the home run was hit, how fast they run the bases and I saw that in the World Series. Yeah, it's some very similar information and it will show up on broadcast as well. They will highlight it in the broadcast in various ways but it takes a little while to surface content in a meaningful way. That's a good story. I mean, you watch baseball for four hours or five hours as it was last night and you think, oh, there's plenty of time to tell whatever story you want but you won't care about the pitch that's, you know, the pitch or batter match that's happening now. You don't have all the time in the world to go back and look at every single play. So finding meaningful stuff is kind of the... The old school guys don't like it with the new, the young kids do. I love it, the young kids do. Well, that's why they put it on the web. So you can go look at it when you're, you know, in between innings or after the game when you really want to dig in. Right, and you've been in this for a while. You worked with the yellow first down line. And we talked a little bit offline. You know, the value of that information and the use of that information has really evolved over time from just a simple kind of entertainment vehicle, a simple little piece of additional information to now it's really being used by a number of organizations in very specific means. I wonder if you can kind of unpack that a little bit. Yeah, I think the best anecdote about that is the longest tracking that's been going on in professional American sports is NASCAR tracking because it's a large vehicle. There's been GPS devices on those cars since 2001 and for the first 12 years of the life of that it was simply to put pointers and speeds up on the broadcast while you were watching it. NASCAR or the cars can look very similar to the pointer, points out who the announcer's talking about so you can tell the cars apart, right? And it's almost as important as the yellow line as the football to integral to the broadcast. Well, in order to do that, you have to track all the cars all the time. And NASCAR kind of stood the value of that but in terms of using that data both in real time during the races and historically to really look at car performance, driver performance, track performance, it never really surfaced until 2012, 2013 to comprehensively look at all that data and it was about the same time the NBA was adopting camera tracking and things like that. So that is the world we're in now where everybody wants all the data and now we're at that, we have the opposite problem. Everybody wants all the data but now they're trying to figure out which parts of it really matter. Mike, I want to ask you about the future. Obviously, I geek out on the whole tracking thing. You start getting into that kind of stuff it's pretty incredible, it's in the short term there's a lot of low hanging fruit but the big trend that we're hearing about is eSports, virtual reality. How do you see that playing out because now you set in the foundational building blocks in data to have a whole nother fan experience. Talk about that. I think it's two-fold. So obviously the NFL is a partnership with the eSports at the Madden NFL game and so something will occur there when and how. We'll see. It's a natural connect that's there. One, it has a consumer manifestation where we all get to play at home and we want to go throw that past Russell Wilson through that got picked off in the Super Bowl. What would it look like? Things like that. Happy Butler, yeah. Yeah. It's your Patriots fan. I thought I'd throw you that one. Thank you very much. But what's even more, what's fascinating to me is somebody who kind of is both inside and outside of sports simultaneously. I'm still a big fan. I love to watch sports. I went with my wife to watch the Steelers play the Bengals this Sunday because she's a huge Steelers fan and I still love the game. Great stadium. But in having the data like this, one of the big things we talk about and you've seen some other Silicon Valley companies do it with virtual reality and the main thing they use it for is quarterbacks. Like give a quarterback a view of the game. And that's one of the biggest things at the NFL level. There's limited numbers of hours of practice and there's only so many reps in the game. So if the Patriots are grooming Jimmy Garoppolo to be a quarterback someday and he's playing behind Tom Brady, he is never gonna play in a meaningful game unless Tom Brady's hurt. And even in practice, Tom Brady will not give him reps in practice. He wants all the reps to stay as sharp as possible. How does Jimmy Garoppolo get ready to play before he actually plays? So this is one of the cool things we can do with the location data. Right now you look at all 22 video and you're looking at the game as it unfolds either from behind the offense or up above. And say, you're trying to tell Jimmy Garoppolo, look what Tom did here. He saw, he read this linebacker as being in position and he's signifying a blitz and where was the hot read and where did he throw and what did he really see? But you're seeing it from up above. You're not seeing what Tom Brady saw. With all this data and combining it with EA Sports or other e-game world, you can recreate that world and you can now put Jimmy in every play of the game. And that can be his homework assignment. Go play the game. And you can recreate the exact game. What Tom saw. Try to make the same reactions. Try to read the defense as fast. See what was the, you know, have Tom go through. Great learning. I mean just the explosion of that accelerated learning. Definitely. It trickles down to the college level. It trickles down to trying to train elite high school athletes that has, you know, repercussions throughout the sports. Let's talk about the safety thing real quick. Some anecdotal insight into some things that have come out. Anything that's come out of positive around some of the data? This world athlete performance has been, you know, around forever. And it's really improved in the last five years with all sorts of athlete tracking and our data in particular tracks during the game so it's super valuable. But teams will use the same system to track during practice. NFL practices are particularly intense. Have pretty high workloads, especially in August and leading up to September. And they will use that data to track both baselines of performance for an athlete in terms of workload, acceleration, burst, all these types of things and quantified. And they'll even sometimes try to combine them into combined metrics that represent a lot at once. Because again, it's a fire hose of data. Let's get it down to something I can care about. Because a head coach isn't going to listen to his, even his strength coach. That guy's got about three minutes a day to tell him what he thinks and what kind of changes they need to make. So he'll actually start regulating practice. A guy's coming back from injury. He'll be able to compare those, you know, other than just, oh, I'm looking at him. His cuts look a little soft. He'll actually be able to quantify those. It's actually, he's about 70% of what's going on. And there was a story about a high school kid whose eye watch saved his life. Give him some of the data coming in. It's a lot of cool stuff. Final worry, we've got to cut the segment off here. We're getting the hook here. What is the coolest thing that you see out there that gets you jazzed up in the sports data, technology, visualization? What's the one thing that you personally get excited about right now? There's quite a bit. I saw something, I went over to Australia last year to look at what some other people are doing. And they have kind of a more rudimentary, older technologies based on GPS. But they kind of just have thrown convention aside and they put those devices right on players during the games. Even though they're bulky and they could get her. Like GoPro or something like camera. It's a tracking device, of course, like we do. And it only works outdoors. It has lots of limitations. But they're like, because the NFL is so big, it will not move fast. Because the AFL is smaller, it moves very fast. And what they do is they have five people sitting right in the stadium, like looking at the data. They have five more on the sidelines. They are using the data in real time in games. The coach is relying on it to decide who comes in and out of the match. They are obviously trying to prevent injury. They're trying to maximize performance. They are integrating technology live within games in a way that maybe some fans already think happens. But it certainly does not. I will tell you that on the upper US sports level. But I think we are much closer to that. And we realize I think the NFL in having this data and having all the data. NMLB to their old school. It's all these rules and instituted. I think it's going to make it into live games stuff in the next five years. So what do you see when they're doing that? I mean, what are some of the manifestations of real time in game changes? Well, right now it's just limited athlete performance. So they're just looking at this guy's tired. This guy's fresh. And I know what his fresh versus your tired is. Let's get him in. Or what level of tired makes you less effective than your backup. That's just scratching the surface. In American football, there's a tactical and schematic element that will kind of blow it away. Because we all know it's a chess match. That's why it's so fun to watch. Mike, great insight. Thanks for sharing the data here on sports data. SV, be right back with more. Cube here, the cube tank at the shark tank. Be right back.