NFL Combine IQ and Draft IQ: Delivering insights to millions with Amazon QuickSight

The National Football League (NFL) Combine and Draft represent two of football’s most anticipated annual events, where elite prospects showcase their athletic skill in career-defining moments and franchises make key decisions that can alter their trajectory for years to come. By partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the NFL has developed two groundbreaking experiences, Combine IQ and Draft IQ, using Amazon QuickSight. These experiences have transformed these events, providing insights on player performance and draft predictions to over 1.14 million visitors and to millions of fans viewing broadcasts worldwide. In this post, we discuss how the NFL succeeded in delivering insights to fans at scale with QuickSight.

Combine IQ: Changing the game for scouts and fans

For fans worldwide and scouts across all 32 clubs, identifying the next superstars from every sprint, jump, and cut on the field during the annual NFL Scouting Combine has historically been more art than science. To transform this evaluation process, NFL turned to data, analytics, and AI. Today’s Combine tracks player movement data with extraordinary precision—capturing data with sophisticated sensors on players every tenth of a second during drills, measuring everything from acceleration profiles to change-of-direction abilities. Deriving meaning from this exponential increase in data demanded a new approach to data analysis. Using the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities from AWS, the NFL Next Gen Stats (NGS) team developed Draft Score, a simple-to-understand metric ranging from 50–99 that measures player performance against historic and position-specific benchmarks.

To deliver these scores and detailed insights to NFL clubs and fans, the NFL worked with AWS to develop Combine IQ—a groundbreaking dynamic dashboard powered by QuickSight that transforms raw Combine data into intuitive, interactive visualizations that update in near real time as players are on the field. The Combine IQ dashboard (shown in the following screenshot) has received over 288,000 visitors to date, delivering unprecedented insights on player performance.

“The Combine IQ dashboard represents a quantum leap in how we share NFL Combine data with fans and analysts,” explains Mike Band, Senior Manager of NFL Next Gen Stats Research & Analytics. “For the first time, we’re able to provide real-time insights that previously were only available to professional scouts and team personnel. Imagine watching a defensive back complete the 40-yard dash, and instantly seeing how his acceleration compares to every NFL starter at his position. That’s the power we’re putting in fans’ hands.”

The solution included several key components:

• Data pipeline – At its core, the system relied on collecting data from RFID sensors at extremely granular intervals from athletes performing drills. This raw data flowed into AWS for initial processing, where the NFL’s NGS team calculated Draft Scores and other complex metrics using ML models. The processed statistics were then formatted and loaded into QuickSight SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine), which optimized the data for rapid querying and visualization.
• Visualization layer – Fans engaged with Combine data through an embedded dashboard containing several advanced visualizations. Many of these advanced visualizations took advantage of the QuickSight integration with the Highcharts library. This library helped the NFL to deliver interactive and infographic-style visualizations, making complex statistical concepts accessible to casual fans while maintaining the depth required for professional scouts.
• Scalable architecture – Using the scalable QuickSight architecture, Combine IQ successfully supported tens of thousands of concurrent user requests while maintaining responsive performance, providing access to sophisticated analytics for fans worldwide. QuickSight SPICE helped the NFL provide rapid data retrieval and calculation, maintaining smooth performance during peak usage. QuickSight is able to update new information efficiently at high frequencies, which helped deliver near real-time updates as well.
• Public embedding – The public embedding capability in QuickSight made it possible to seamlessly integrate the dashboard into the NFL’s website without requiring complex user authentication or heavy coding in the parent web application, while providing a frictionless experience for fans worldwide.

Using the unique capabilities of QuickSight, Combine IQ enhanced the NFL scouting experience by democratizing access to professional-level analytics, delivering near real-time player comparisons and comprehensive performance metrics to scouts and fans alike.

The following screenshot showcases the NFL Combine IQ dashboard, which shares Next Gen Stats Draft Scores for the top prospects in the 2025 NFL Draft class.

Draft IQ: Anticipating draft day decisions backed by data

Building on the success of Combine IQ, Draft IQ takes talent evaluation analytics to the next level, helping fans anticipate the players that will be drafted during the annual NFL Draft. Draft IQ processes vast amounts of information—from historical patterns to live draft data—to deliver insights that help fans anticipate team moves and analyze trade probabilities. Draft IQ provided insights to over 853,000 visitors across all 7 draft rounds, updating every 3 minutes during the live draft.

Using QuickSight, Draft IQ provided personalized dashboards for all 32 teams, incorporating data on team needs, offensive and defensive schemes, draft capital, reported interest, and front office tendencies. This comprehensive analysis produced “trade up likelihood” and “trade down likelihood” ratings for each team, and predictions of the most likely draft targets based on pre-draft interest and organizational philosophies in each round. These predictions provided fans with unprecedented insights on potential draft day moves, using capabilities previously available only to internal team analysts. As Band shares, “Through QuickSight, we’ve been able to bring this to the public and to the fans to make them smarter.”

The following screenshot shows an example of the NFL Draft IQ dashboard.

Draft IQ featured the Draft AI Assistant, powered by Amazon Q Business, which helped users gain insights into trade probabilities and potential team strategies through natural language interactions. Fans could ask questions like “Who are the top five remaining defensive tackles for the 49ers?” or “What positions are Seattle prioritizing in round 1?” and receive immediate, data-driven responses.

Using large language models (LLMs), Amazon Q Business interpreted and responded to detailed queries about draft prospects, team strategies, and historical draft patterns. The system generated AI-powered insights using the same Next Gen Stats research data that powered Draft IQ, offering fans an innovative way to engage with the draft experience.

The following screenshot showcases how Draft AI Assistant provides immediate draft insights through natural language.

Conclusion

Through Combine IQ and Draft IQ, the NFL has transformed its talent evaluation events into data-driven, interactive experiences accessible to fans worldwide. These experiences demonstrate the power of AWS to process complex data into accessible insights for everyone. By combining AI-assistance from Amazon Q Business with powerful visualization and scalable architecture from QuickSight, the NFL has created a new standard for fan engagement and data accessibility in professional sports. The NFL Combine IQ and Draft IQ experiences serve as a blueprint for how organizations of different sizes and in different industries can effectively provide insights at scale to all of their users, without sacrificing performance or sophistication.

Learn more about the NFL Combine IQ and Draft IQ and explore what QuickSight can do for your organization on our product page.

About the authors

Jesse Gebhardt is a Senior Manager specializing in analytics and Generative AI and leading team of experts for Amazon QuickSight. He has spent over 15 years in the Business Intelligence industry. At AWS, he aids customers around the globe gain insight and value from the data they have stored in their data lakes and data warehouses. Jesse lives in sunny Phoenix, and is an amateur electronic music producer.

Ari Entin is Head, Sports & Entertainment Marketing at AWS, based in Silicon Valley. He joined Amazon in 2021 from Facebook where he led AI communications and marketing. He has driven integrated media campaigns for top-tier consumer electronics, sports and entertainment, and technology companies for decades.

Arun Santhosh is a Principal Solutions Architect for Amazon QuickSight. Arun started his career at IBM as a developer and progressed on to be an Application Architect. Later, he worked as a Technical Architect at Cognizant. Business intelligence has been his core focus in these prior roles as well.

Chris Weitzel is a Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Amazon Q in QuickSight, helping customers discover new ways to make better decisions with the help of AI. Prior to AWS, he honed his expertise in manufacturing technology through diverse roles in marketing, sales operations, and solution architecture. He began his career with a focus on data and analytics, developing automated trading systems in quantitative finance.