NFL Hackathon

From the NFL Draft to Super Bowl, football is a family affair across the globe… 200 million fans worldwide experience the NFL in so many ways. Whether you watch games and events on your TV, phone, tablet, or console - connecting to the NFL is so easy!

But one thing to consider is the new technology the NFL has recently integrated into the game. Every player in the NFL is wearing devices to track their location on the field in real-time during games. During the 2015 season, the NFL has created their suite of Next Gen Stats, but the question is:

What can YOU do with it?

For the first time ever the NFL is pulling the curtain back on it’s data for developers.

Challenge: 

Develop the next generation of engaging NFL stories using the provided NFL Next Gen Stats Data. Using the raw location data, you’ll demo new innovations of real time game pattern recognition that educates the fans and demonstrates the game in ways that have never been seen before. Teams should avoid simply visualizing the data or playback of data. 

What information or patterns can you surface out of the data that can provide new insight into the game, educate the fan, or demonstrate the game in ways never before seen?

Ideas being tossed around include:

• Create a new formula to rate players such as a new quarterback rating or player group efficiency
• Identify common patterns such as where players in certain positions spend their time or what paths players run during plays
• Automatically calculate statistics or descriptions of what occurred on plays in the game
• The demonstration of your data can include visualization or a demo of the processing of the data that outputs the final results.

Grand Prize - $10,000 and the team will fly roundtrip to the NFL LA campus for a day, demo their hack to NFL engineers & staff, and tour the NFL Media Field House & Gridiron Studios of the NFL Network

1st Runner-up - $5,000

2nd Runner-up - $2,500

Wednesday, February 17th
6:30 -8:30 pm Pre-NFL Hackathon Virtual Session via WebEx and Release of first Sample of Data

Friday, February 19th
5:30- 8:00 pm Happy Hour/Hackathon Kick-Off with NFL Engineers!

Saturday, February 20th
09:00am - Doors Open & Breakfast
10:00am - Opening Ceremony & Presentations
11:00am - Play With Data
12:00pm - Lunch
1:00pm - Breakout Session & Coding Begins
06:00pm - Dinner
10:00pm - Pitch Workshop
12:00am - Midnight Snack
12:00- 8:00am - Hack through the night*

*Although staying overnight isn’t required, we highly recommend it.

Sunday, February 21st
07:00am - Breakfast
11:00am - Submission Deadline
11:30am - Lunch
12:30pm - Judging Begins
02:30pm - Awards
03:00pm - Closing

Each submission will be scored on the following criteria with a minimum score of 0 and maximum score of 20 points, with the final score being the average of the judges’ scores:

• Story (5 points): Did the team produce a compelling story from the data provided that is replay-worthy?
• Creativity (5 points): How creative was the team identifying unique patterns and pulling new insights from the data?
• Impact (5 points): Did the team create something that can have a real and valuable impact?
• Originality (5 points): Did the project go beyond just visualizing the data, but also pull new and surprising ideas from it?

Teams of up to 5 humans are allowed.

• You must demo your hack in order to present. No slide-decks or power-points will be allowed. 2 minute presentation 1 minute Q&A from Judges.
• Each hackathon has its individual hackathon.io http://www.hackathon.io/nfl-hackathon page, and projects should be submitted on it. Submission time is 11am Sunday. Hackathon.io can also be utilized to form teams prior to the hack. 
• Winning teams will be subject to a code-review at some point following the event or immediately before winning.
• Fresh Code Enforced: We all start coding at the same time. This is done to keep things fair. Please don’t come in and build on top of previous projects if you want to win.
• Every participant must agree to this participant