A Department of Statistics-affiliated team was named one of three finalists of the 2026 NFL Big Data Bowl.
Jack Sullivan ’25, who recently completed a degree in Data Science and Economics, and Shekhar Shah x’27, a Computer Sciences and Statistics double major, took home a $9,000 prize and earned an exclusive invitation to present their work at the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis.
The annual Big Data Bowl is an open competition in which participants use troves of raw data, released by the league itself, to uncover new insights useful to coaches, coordinators, and scouts. Sullivan and Shah’s project, “Path Against the Pass,” used player‑tracking data and transformer models to evaluate how defenders close space after the ball is thrown. They introduced a new metric — Completion Probability Added Above Average (CPAA) — which measures how efficiently a defender’s path reduces the likelihood of a completed pass. It’s a creative and valuable tool for understanding coverage performance.
Shah is the current president of the UW–Madison Sports Analytics Club, whose members collaborated on a range of submissions to this year’s Big Data Bowl. He and Sullivan earned an honorable mention in the same competition last year, a taste of success that propelled them to put together an even more creative project this time around.
Read more about the Sports Analytics Club’s involvement in the NFL Big Data Bowl.