Who won the Big Data Bowl 2024?

The winners of the 2024 Big Data Bowl are Matthew Chang, Katherine Dai, Daniel Jiang and Harvey Cheng.

Uncovering Missed Tackle Opportunities You can find their notebook HERE

And a short presentation from the team.

Winner Analysis of the Big Data Bowl 2024

Top 8 comments and insights from the winning team.

• Missed Tackle Opportunities represents a new class of defensive mistake that is not captured by current football statistics.
• For this analysis they had access to approximately 12000 plays from the first 9 weeks of the season.
• A missed tackle opportunity is each time a defender had the chance to tackle down the ball carrier but was unsuccessful. Maybe he didn't even try but he had the chance.
• Using tracking data and some generated features they created a model to predict for each play the probability each defender would tackle the ball carrier in the next second.
• If a player has at least 75% for more than 0.5 seconds and doesn't capitalize that tackle, dropping the its probabilities below %75 in the future for more than 0.5 seconds, they label that as misses tackle opportunity.
• They found about 4 times more missed tackle opportunities compared to the NFL tracked ones.
• They found some (not large) correlation between missed opportunities by team and their win rate
• They ranked defenders and runners based on this new metric. How many tackle opportunities the defendants generate for themselves.

Who are the top 3 defenders according to generated tackle opportunities?

• Fred Warner
• Nick Bolton
• Alex Singleton

Who are the top 5 more elusive players?

Wide receivers

1. Deebo Samuel 2. Rondale Moore 3. A.J. Brown 4. Curtis Samuel 5. Parris Campbell

Running Back

1. Justice Hill 2. Nick Chubb 3. Kenneth Walker 4. Jeffery Wilson 5. Christian McCaffrey

Quarterback

1. Lamar Jackson 2. Josh Allen 3. Kyler Murray 4. Justin Fields 5. Jalen Hurts

When was Big Data Bowl 2024?

The submission was in early January 2024 , then the judges evaluated the different works and on February 28th 2024 the in-person event took place at the Scouting Combine in Indianapolis.