Research Papers

Sungmin Hong, Laura Kulowski, Dan Volk, Henry Wang, Keegan Abdoo, Conor McQuiston, Kyeong Hoon (Jonathan) Jung, Mike Band, Diego Socolinsky

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In spite of the importance of the pass rush in professional football, pass rushing statistics only include the final outcomes of a play, e.g., sack and pass-made. They do not capture the dynamics of the pass rush or fine-grained insights throughout a play on how much pressure a rusher generates during the rush. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that enables the estimation of defensive pressure scores throughout a play with high accuracy and performance for rusher and blocker identification, rusher-blocker match-up and pressure score estimation and show the real-world applications of our framework including enriched analytics.