Zebra Technologies is entering its eighth season in partnership with the NFL, and the data that ultimately makes the league's Next Gen Stats comes from the tags in the football, individual player shoulder pads, first-down markers and the pylons.
And in reporting this story, what I found is that the future of NFL data collection and analytics is hard to predict.
"Where things can go with the data," says Matt Swensson, the NFL's VP of emerging products and technology, "you can get pretty broad pretty quickly."