Predicting plays in the National Football League
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper aims to develop an interpretable machine learning model to predict plays (pass versus rush) in the National Football League that will be useful for players and coaches in real time. Using data from the 2013–2014 to 2016–2017 NFL regular seasons, which included 1034 games and 130,344 pass/rush plays, we first develop and compare several machine learning models to determine the maximum possible prediction accuracy. The best performing model, a neural network, achieves a prediction accuracy of 75.3%, which is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods applied to other datasets. Then, we search over a family of simple decision tree models to identify one that captures 86% of the prediction accuracy of the neural network yet can be easily memorized and implemented in an actual game. We extend the analysis to building decision tree models tailored for each of the 32 NFL teams, obtaining accuracies ranging from 64.7% to 82.5%. Overall, our decision tree models can be a useful tool for coaches and players to improve their chances of stopping an offensive play.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it