In this challenge, you're tasked to investigate the relationship between the playing surface and the injury and performance of National Football League (NFL) athletes and to examine factors that may contribute to lower extremity injuries.
You'll also notice there isn't a leaderboard, and you are not required to develop a predictive model. This isn't a traditional supervised Kaggle machine learning competition. For more information on this challenge format, see this forum thread. This challenge is part of NFL 1st & Future, the NFL’s annual Super Bowl competition designed to spur innovation in player health, safety and performance.
In the NFL, 12 stadiums have fields with synthetic turf. Recent investigations of lower limb injuries among football athletes have indicated significantly higher injury rates on synthetic turf compared with natural turf (Mack et al., 2018; Loughran et al., 2019). In conjunction with the epidemiologic investigations, biomechanical studies of football cleat-surface interactions have shown that synthetic turf surfaces do not release cleats as readily as natural turf and may contribute to the incidence of non-contact lower limb injuries (Kent et al., 2015). Given these differences in cleat-turf interactions, it has yet to be determined whether player movement patterns and other measures of player performance differ across playing surfaces and how these may contribute to the incidence of lower limb injury.
Now, the NFL is challenging Kagglers to help them examine the effects that playing on synthetic turf versus natural turf can have on player movements and the factors that may contribute to lower extremity injuries. NFL player tracking, also known as Next Gen Stats, is the capture of real time location data, speed and acceleration for every player, every play on every inch of the field. As part of this challenge, the NFL has provided full player tracking of on-field position for 250 players over two regular season schedules. One hundred of the athletes in the study data set sustained one or more injuries during the study period that were identified as a non-contact injury of a type that may have turf interaction as a contributing factor to injury. The remaining 150 athletes serve as a representative sample of the larger NFL population that did not sustain a non-contact lower-limb injury during the study period. Details of the surface type and environmental parameters that may influence performance and outcome are also provided.
Your challenge is to characterize any differences in player movement between the playing surfaces and identify specific scenarios (e.g., field surface, weather, position, play type, etc.) that interact with player movement to present an elevated risk of injury. More details on the entry criteria are available in Evaluation Tab.
The National Football League is America's most popular sports league, comprised of 32 franchises that compete each year to win the Super Bowl, the world's biggest annual sporting event. Founded in 1920, the NFL developed the model for the successful modern sports league, including national and international distribution, extensive revenue sharing, competitive excellence, and strong franchises across the country.
The NFL is committed to advancing progress in the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of sports-related injuries. The NFL's ongoing health and safety efforts include support for independent medical research and engineering advancements and a commitment to work to better protect players and make the game safer, including enhancements to medical protocols and improvements to how our game is taught and played.
As more is learned, the league evaluates and changes rules to evolve the game and try to improve protections for players. Since 2002 alone, the NFL has made 50 rules changes intended to eliminate potentially dangerous tactics and reduce the risk of injuries.
For more information about the NFL's health and safety efforts, please visit www.PlaySmartPlaySafe.com