• Objective: Identify practice-level movement metrics that differentiate Shrine Bowl defenders who reach the NFL
• Data: Shrine Bowl practice tracking data + NFL participation data
• Focus: Linebackers & edge defenders (“box defenders”)
• Key Metric: Directional acceleration scaled by player mass (directional force)

Key Findings:

• Peak speed and peak acceleration do not meaningfully separate NFL vs non-NFL players
• Average directional acceleration and force across reps do
• NFL players show similar peaks, but sustain higher directional force across repetitions
• Directional force also scales with NFL utilization, not just NFL entry

Shrine Bowl X Sumer Sports - Directional Force for Box Defenders.pdf

Tools Used: Python (DuckDB, Pandas), Excel, tracking data aggregation