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AWS and the NFL have launched Next Gen Trends on NFL.com, a free platform that gives fans access to insights drawn from the league's Next Gen Stats system.
Using eight years of player-tracking data, Next Gen Trends presents team identities, league-wide shifts and tactical patterns in a visual format. It is built on NFL Next Gen Stats, which processes raw tracking data through more than 75 machine-learning models supported by AWS.
The tool marks the first time fans can directly explore the analysis behind on-air insights on formations, coverages, pressure and blocking matchups. It has two main views: one focused on league-wide trends over time and another centred on individual team profiles.
Fan access
At league level, users can track how schemes and tendencies change from season to season, including shifts in defensive looks and running concepts. At team level, the site shows how a club's strategic profile compares with league averages in areas such as personnel usage, blitz rates, motion and play-action.
The platform is intended to move beyond traditional statistics by showing the patterns behind weekly results. That includes how identities change under new coordinators, how certain approaches rise or fall across the league, and how individual teams align with or diverge from those broader movements.
Keegan Abdoo, Senior Manager, NFL Next Gen Stats, described the thinking behind the project in a launch statement.
"The goal is to take the hundreds, if not thousands, of metrics we have built across Next Gen Stats, distill them down to the few that actually represent a team's tendencies and schemes, and present that in a way that takes a complex concept and makes it digestible. We want to get the fan at home closer to the coach's room," said Abdoo.
The system relies on data collected from chips in players' shoulder pads, which record location many times each second. Advances in automated analysis have made it possible to classify elements of each play consistently and at scale, rather than relying on manual charting.
Automation layer
That process allows every snap in every game to be described automatically in real time. It also enables the underlying models to connect single-play reads across games and seasons, turning isolated data points into longer-term patterns.
Mike Band, Senior Manager, Research & Analytics, NFL Next Gen Stats, said that broader view had not previously been available in a single product.
"We can tell the story of every element of the game now. There are games within the game: the passing offense, the run game, the pass rush, the coverage. For the first time, we can take all of that and show a fan a team's whole identity in a single view, then let them watch how it has shifted week to week and season to season," said Band.
The platform uses visual formats intended to simplify a large volume of data, including radar charts that summarise team identity and trend charts that track how specific tendencies move across weeks and years.
Abdoo said making the information readable was a central challenge in building the product.
"Data visualization for its own sake is not the smart path. A visualization has to be valuable enough that it is digestible, that it carries more than one dimension you can take away, and that a fan understands what to take from it without a tutorial. Making something simple out of something this complex is actually the hard part," he said.
The NFL pointed to examples such as the Los Angeles Rams' shift in offensive style over recent seasons and the San Francisco 49ers' use of specific personnel groupings to illustrate how the site maps strategic evolution over time. More broadly, it is designed to let users move between macro league trends and the finer details of one team's approach.
AWS role
AWS underpins the public-facing product as the infrastructure and analytics layer used by the Next Gen Stats research team. The same environment supports analysis for broadcast output and now the fan-facing platform.
Band said the technical work is intended to remain largely invisible to users.
"Running the models on every play, keeping it current through the season, serving it to millions of people at once: that all happens underneath. It frees us to focus on the football, on what is actually worth showing and how to make it land," he said.
Next Gen Trends updates throughout the season, allowing fans to revisit team profiles, formation trends and league-wide shifts as they change.