Namrata Ray.
Ray
Jugal Marfatia.
Marfatia

If you’ve never watched American football, it can look like organized chaos. But for Washington State University graduate students Jugal Marfatia and Namrata Ray, looking at data snapshots of plays allowed them to find hidden data inside the chaos. That eventually lead the duo to a trip to Indianapolis later this month for the NFL’s Scouting Combine.

Marfatia, a Ph.D. student in economics and master’s student in statistics at WSU, and Ray, a Ph.D. student in sociology, entered the NFL’s 2020 Big Data Bowl competition to answer a question: when a running back takes a handoff, how many yards should we expect him to gain?

The WSU team were named among six finalists in the collegiate event, earning a trip to the combine.

“We’ll get to meet with coaches and league officials to talk about what we found when breaking down all the data,” Marfatia said.

The NFL posted the contest on Kaggle, an online community of data scientists, and over 2,000 people competed.

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