The IT Nerd

A first-of-its-kind interactive platform, Next Gen Trends is free to all fans, and goes beyond the box score to show the strategic identity of every team and the trends reshaping the league.

Every NFL team has a fingerprint, a play style all its own, and it shows up on every single snap. Watch a team break the huddle: the personnel grouping, the spacing of the formation, the kind of run they favor on first down. Each choice is a clue, and together they reveal an identity, sometimes one that looks nothing like the team from a few seasons ago. It is all hiding in plain sight on every play.

But a single play only shows a flash of it. What matters is the pattern it belongs to, and how those patterns connect, snap to snap, game to game, season to season. That is the real story of a team, and no broadcast or box score has ever stitched those threads together for a fan. Football has always had this layer. It has just never had a place to slow it down and show you.

Next Gen Trends changes that. It is a new, free, interactive platform on NFL.com, built on NFL Next Gen Stats (NGS), the league’s player-tracking system. But it is more than tracking data. NGS runs that raw data through more than 75 machine learning models, powered by AWS; the same ones that classify coverages, measure pressure, and identify blocking matchups to turn millions of data points into the patterns and tendencies that describe how a team actually plays. This is the engine behind the insights fans already hear on Sundays. Next Gen Trends is the first time they can dig into it themselves. Visit it here: nfl.com/trends.

Finding the Stories Beyond the Box Score

Here is what it actually does. Next Gen Trends takes eight years of NFL Next Gen Stats tracking data and reorganizes it around something the box score was never built to show – not the final numbers, but the recurring patterns that help decide games. It is built around the questions people really ask. How does my team win? What makes this matchup worth watching? How is the sport itself changing? Each answer is a visual, guided view rather than a spreadsheet, pulling the fan off the stat line and into the coach’s room where the strategy actually lives.

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.

— Keegan Abdoo, Senior Manager, NFL Next Gen Stats

It works at two zoom levels. Pull back, and you see the whole league moving – schemes catching on and dying out, defenses shifting toward split-safety looks, offenses leaning more on outside zone runs – the way the sport is played drifting season over season. Zoom in, and you see a single team in sharp focus – what makes its identity distinct, how it has changed under a new coordinator, where it cuts against the grain of everyone else.

Why This Wasn’t Possible Until Now

A trends platform like this could not have existed even a few years ago. Two things changed, and together they unlocked a third that is the real reason it works.

It starts with history. Next Gen Trends draws on eight years of NFL player-tracking data, captured by chips in every player’s shoulder pads that log location many times a second. Five seasons is enough to see the game move – a scheme that was an outlier becoming the norm, a defense that reinvents itself, a leaguewide shift you could never spot one Sunday at a time. You cannot show how football is changing without seasons to compare, and this is the first time that a full arc has been laid out for fans.

Then there is automation. Figuring out what happened on a given play – the coverage, the protection, the blocking scheme – was previously done by a person watching film and charting it by hand, slowly and subjectively. Working with AWS, the Next Gen Stats team trained machine-learning models to read it straight from the tracking data, so every play in every game is described automatically, consistently, and in real time. That is what makes a leaguewide, every-snap view possible at all.

And that is what unlocks the third piece. The data does not just pile up; it becomes a story. The same models that classify a coverage or identify a run concept can connect those reads across a season into a team’s identity, surface the tendency behind a matchup, and generate the context that turns a wall of numbers into something a fan can follow. A single number says a defense blitzes 28 percent of the time. The story is that the number has climbed every week since their bye, that it spikes on third down, and that their next opponent has struggled against exactly that pressure. Same data, but now it means something. The raw data is the ingredient. The insight is the 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.

— Mike Band, Senior Manager, Research & Analytics, NFL Next Gen Stats

Two Ways to Explore: the League and Your Team

Next Gen Trends is built to be explored, not just read, and it opens at two altitudes a fan can move between freely. One looks out at the whole sport. The other looks hard at a single team. Each is built from the same tracking data and models, shaped into views designed to answer a different kind of question.

At the League Level

The league view is about the game as a system in motion. Instead of a standings table, it tracks how strategy itself is trending – which formations and coverages are on the rise, which are fading, and how far a given tendency sits above or below the leaguewide norm. The payoff is seeing the narrative in the movement. You can watch the league tip toward two-high safety coverage and pinpoint the season it became the default or follow the run game drift toward one blocking scheme while a handful of teams stubbornly zag the other way. It is the macro picture of how football is being played right now, and the story of how it got here over eight years.

The power is in the movement between the two. See a leaguewide trend, then drop into a single team to find out whether it follows the trend or defies it, then pull back out to see who else is doing the same thing. That back-and-forth, from the shape of the whole sport down to one snap-by-snap identity and up again, is the part no stats page or broadcast graphic has offered before.

Making the Game Easier to Understand

The hardest engineering problem on Next Gen Trends is not collecting the data or running the models. It is making the result feel simple. Anyone can dump a stat table onto a page. The real work is building visualizations that carry multiple dimensions of insight and are still immediately readable, where a fan can grasp the takeaway without having every element explained to them. As the team puts it, creating simplicity out of complexity is itself a very complex process.

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.

— Keegan Abdoo, Senior Manager, NFL Next Gen Stats

In practice, that looks like representing a team’s whole identity as a radar chart or showing how a single tendency has moved year over year, or how a team’s performance shifts as its season unfolds. And the product is designed to move fluidly between the big picture and the fine detail, from the leaguewide macro view down to the granular team view and back.

The examples make it concrete. Look at how the Rams have changed across the past five seasons. Sean McVay took the league by storm with an offense that was based out of condensed formations in 11 personnel and built the run game out of outside zone. As McVay’s coaching tree spread across the league, we saw this play style permeate and defenses change in response. But the Rams have also adapted to their roster construction and changing defensive conditions and now lead the NFL in 13 personnel usage and man blocking runs. Next Gen Trends lets a fan see that entire evolution tracked over time, in one place.

Or take Kyle Shanahan and the 49ers. Many NFL football fans love Shanahan, because he evolves, and the data shows exactly what unlocked when the team added Christian McCaffrey: a twenty-one-personnel grouping that became nearly impossible to defend because the offense could run anything and everything from it, the way a positionless lineup stresses a defense in basketball. That is a story a fan can now watch unfold across the site, rather than needing a film degree to piece it together.

The Engine Under the Hood

For the fan, the story on Next Gen Trends is always football first: formations, tendencies, matchups, identity. AWS is the reason those stories can be told at this scale and this speed, but it is meant to be felt rather than announced. The models that read every play, the real-time infrastructure that describes it as it happens, and the analytics environment the research team works in day to day are all AWS, sitting underneath the handful of clean visualizations a fan actually sees.

The patterns on Next Gen Trends come from the same Next Gen Stats research the league already produces in Amazon Quick, where analysts explore tracking data, test ideas, and shape the insights that appear on air. That continuity matters. The fan experience is not a watered-down export of the real thing; it is an extension of the research workflow itself. Because the barrier to building a new view is low, an analyst can go from an idea to a published, fan-facing visualization quickly, which is what lets the platform stay fresh week to week.

The hard part is invisible to the fan, and that is the point. 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.

— Mike Band, Senior Manager, Research & Analytics, NFL Next Gen Stats

The technology story is most powerful when a fan realizes, after the fact, that what they just explored would be impossible without the analytics and infrastructure behind it. The attribution is consistent and understated by design, carried through the Next Gen Stats and AWS presence on the page rather than stamped on every chart.

A Season That Never Stops Evolving

Next Gen Trends is not a report that ships once and goes stale. It is a living platform that updates as the season moves, so that team identities, formation trends, and scheme tendencies rise and fade in something close to real time. It is built to be the kind of destination a fan checks in on every week, where the landscape has shifted a little since the last visit, and where eight seasons of history are always available underneath.

That is the real promise. The platform implicitly teaches you what matters about football right now, which strategies are working, what your team is doing and how it fits the bigger picture, by letting you explore rather than lecturing you. The more you poke at it, the more the game opens up, until a casual viewer has quietly become an informed one.

For anyone who has ever wanted to understand the chess match beneath the chaos, and maybe sound a little smarter at the Super Bowl party, the playbook is finally open. Explore Next Gen Trends on NFL.com.