The second phase of my time at the NC State University Department of Statistics took place in Professor Eric Laber’s Laber Labs. I joined graduate students Nick Kapur and James Gilman on their project to improve playcalling in the NFL. To overcome the issues with limited games and the exploration-stifling risk in the actual NFL, we simulated football games in the popular video-game Madden NFL, allowing us to have vastly more data and the freedom to explore playcalling techniques. Raspberry Pi’s were connected to X-Box controllers to manuever through the game menu and the data were scraped from screenshots of the game. When I left the project we had 5 systems running 24 hours a day with more planned.

I worked on the project from December, 2017 to April, 2018, creating data visualizations and writing Python scripts for various aspects of the complex system.

Madden Screenshot