The National Football League is hosting hundreds of aspiring players this week, offering them a chance to showcase their skills as part of the 2025 NFL Scouting Combine. During the four-day interview process, which kicked off Thursday, teams will evaluate player performance across the 40-yard dash, a series of jumps and several drills.
Each test yields mountains of data points, which teams analyze to decide who they’ll draft in April. But traditional data tracking capabilities lack the necessary context for thorough player evaluations.
“The Combine itself can be monotonous reporting of data points, but if you look deeper into the data and connect certain dots, you see patterns,” Mike Band, senior manager of NFL Next Gen Stats Research & Analytics, told CIO Dive. “You don’t have to be the fastest player, but you got to be fast enough.”
Using Amazon QuickSight, an AI-powered service, the NFL and AWS developed the Combine IQ dashboard, which debuted Thursday, to visualize data for fans and analysts. The dashboard showcases comparative player rankings and Draft Scores, created in partnership with AWS to measure player athleticism and provide insight into a player’s potential success in the NFL using historical comparisons and position-specific benchmarks.
This year’s Combine will mark the first year fans and analysts have access to the advanced data and analytics capabilities via the dashboard powered by Next Gen Stats and Amazon QuickSight, the second year for the 32 teams to get player tracking data and the third year of data collection via sensors worn by participants.
“What really matters is you need a runway of seasons of data points to be able to find out what’s actually the signal in the noise,” Band said. “We feel like now that we are going to have three years of data — and those three years of players will have played seasons in the NFL — the clubs themselves will be able to … break down the speed and acceleration characteristics far beyond what they’ve ever had at the Combine historically.”
The data pipeline
Enterprise leaders can relate to the NFL’s need to make collected data more accessible and meaningful.
Businesses still struggle with poor data frameworks and management practices. Nearly 3 in 5 business leaders say key decisions are made based on inaccurate or inconsistent data, according to a SoftServe report published in February. The majority of respondents also admitted to not knowing how to access needed data.
The NFL’s efforts to enhance its data pipeline have accelerated through its AWS partnership, which kicked off in 2017. Running on AWS infrastructure, the league’s proprietary player and ball tracking platform Next Gen Stats has enabled teams to access advanced statistics that contextualize the action on the field.
As players showcase their strength and agility during the Combine, biometric sensors will track player movement data with tenth-of-a-second accuracy. The NFL’s Next Gen Stats team takes this data to calculate the Draft Score and inform other metrics using machine learning models.
The team formats the stats and loads them into QuickSight’s in-memory engine that optimizes the data for querying and visualization. An automated pipeline refreshes the data every five minutes to bring the latest stats to viewers.
“While I led most of the build of the actual dashboard, we have a team of research analysts who helped along the process, whether it’s with the actual data, retraining our models, validating [or] adding features,” Band said.
The project was a relatively easy lift for NFL engineers, according to Band. The bulk of the work for the public-facing dashboard was enhancing the user interface.
“We’ve unlocked our ability to tell stories with statistics with Next Gen Stats, and what the Combine did is present an opportunity for us to go outside of the game itself and really get into the transition from collegiate prospect to entering the NFL,” Band said.
