The National Football League, like most professional sporting industries, is embracing artificial intelligence. Through a partnership with Amazon Web Services called Next Gen Stats, the NFL is hoping that intelligent algorithms, with the help of high-tech data collection tools, will be able to extract meaningful data from games and decipher patterns in player performances. AWS says it was inspired by submissions to the 2023 Big Data Bowl, an annual software competition organized by the NFL, when it set out to invent a new category of analytics that pertains to the analysis of "pressure" in the game of football. AWS helped build out AI-powered algorithms that can analyze player behavior on the field and can pick up on how aggressive a defender played, how fast they were and even how quickly a quarterback responded. This granular data quantifies pressure and in doing so, allows game analysts to dissect the strategies that might influence plays.

The FCF's 150-plus players earn considerably less than their counterparts in other pro football leagues. The FCF offers $750 per week as base pay for quarterbacks; $550 for offensive linemen and tight ends; $350 for running backs and wide receivers; and $450 for defensive players. They can earn hundreds in bonuses each week for winning and via fan voting for individual categories such as best end zone celebration. The league estimates that between 50 and 70 players are awarded bonus money in some amount each week, with increased totals during the playoffs.

The quarterbacks who competed in Super Bowl 2021 are facing off again – on the cover of the upcoming "Madden NFL 22" video game. Tampa Bay Buccaneers' Tom Brady and the Kansas City Chiefs' Patrick Mahomes both appear on the cover of the game, due out Aug. 20 ($69.99, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/SX; $59.99, for PS4, Xbox One, PCs and Google Stadia). They are the most-recent two Super Bowl MVPs, though Brady won the big game in February. It's a rarity for Madden NFL to have two players on the cover, though in 2010, the video game series featured Super Bowl XLIII participants Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals and Troy Polamalu of the Pittsburgh Steelers as co-cover athletes. Brady and Mahomes have each appeared previously on the Madden NFL cover; Brady in 2018, Mahomes in 2020.

In part-three of this latest series, Jennifer Strong and the team at MIT Technology Review jump on the court to unpack just how much things are changing. This episode was reported and produced by Jennifer Strong, Anthony Green, Tate Ryan-Mosley, Emma Cillekens and Karen Hao. Strong: I'm in Queens in the neighborhood near a massive stadium complex called Citi Field. Right now, everything is locked up and all you can really hear is rush hour traffic. But if you look up, along the edge of the stadium where thousands of fans will, eventually, return, you can see some of the hardware that powers the team's use of face recognition. These cameras are meant to detect faces that have been banned from the grounds–folks like ticket scalpers, people who've run onto the field, even committed crimes out in the parking lot and that system is powered by one of the biggest names in face recognition - N-E-C. It's able to measure things like ears -- and it still works with people wearing masks, hats and sunglasses. And then once you get over to the turnstiles - there's another face system from a company that's known for airport security - called Clear - and that's for ticketless entry.

Imagine this basic plot of a satisfactory sports movie: Rookie quarterback is told he'll never be as successful in the pros as he was in college--not just because he's a rookie, but because he's not a quarterback in the first place. Does our hero give up on his dream of being an NFL quarterback? No, because this is a sports movie. He works hard, smiles a lot, makes it onto the field a handful of times per game, and gains fans in the City of Brotherly Love. And then, with his team down 20-3 and on the verge of its fourth loss in a row, he gets his shot.

The 2019 NFL season quickly evolved into the Lamar Jackson show, every week delivering a different story, usually involving a highlight touchdown, a gaudy stat line, or a charming news conference. One story, however, was different: following a San Francisco 49ers loss at the hands of Jackson's Baltimore Ravens on Dec. 1, Tim Ryan, the radio color analyst for the 49ers, suggested that Jackson was successful in part because his dark skin helped him disguise a dark football. The public backlash was swift and loud, even if the fallout was mild (Ryan was suspended for one game). Instead of an honest conversation about why we talk about certain athletes using racialized language, the sports world settled for an apology and the next news story in the cycle. It is society's inability to adequately address issues of race and bias that motivated Mohit Iyyer, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, to apply artificial intelligence and "big data" analytics toward answering a central question: Do sports commentators demonstrate bias in how they discuss athletes from different racial backgrounds?

People think footballers are all like robots. We can control everything on the pitch. But your heart is beating 200 times a minute.

Pro Football Focus Majority owner and former Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Cris Collinsworth discuss how his company is using artificial intelligence to help football teams determine players' salaries. The National Football League is turning to artificial intelligence to determine whether its teams are paying some of their star players too much money. Pro Football Focus (PFF) is an analytics company that is majority-owned by former Cincinnati Bengals player and NFL broadcaster Chris Collinsworth. The new system, in conjunction with Amazon Web Services (AWS), will provide never-before-seen metrics of all 32 NFL teams. "We break down every player on every play on every game," Collingsworth said during an exclusive interview on FOX Business' "Bulls & Bears" Monday.

Tank warfare isn't traditionally easy to predict. In July 1943, for instance, German military planners believed that their advance on the Russian city of Kursk would be over in ten days. In fact, that attempt lasted nearly two months and ultimately failed. Even the 2003 Battle of Baghdad, in which U.S. forces had air superiority, took a week. The U.S. Army has launched a new effort, dubbed Project Quarterback, to accelerate tank warfare by synchronizing battlefield data with the aid of artificial Intelligence.

Computers are built to process data, but there's a particular form of information so rich and dense in meaning that it's beyond the full comprehension of even the most advanced AI. It's also one that you and I process intuitively and deal in every day: language. Understanding the written and spoken word is a big an important challenge for computer scientists. This month, a small milestone was passed when a pair of teams from Microsoft and Alibaba independently created AI programs that can outperform humans in a reading comprehension test. As you might expect, this news resulted in a flurry of coverage.