The Art of the Interception - How to Take, and Avoid, That Interception

A quick survey of the statistical science behind interceptions. This video has three parts: an overview of the state of the league, offensive strategy, and defensive strategy. It should be obvious that offensive coordinators and players also benefit from learning defensive strategy, and vice versa.

Kinemaster was used to edit the film. All graphs were generated in R using the ggplot2 library, with the paletteer library used to improve the quality of automated color schemes. The major number crunching was done in Python, using scripts and class libraries that can be found at my github, but some lightweight statistical analysis was done in R using plyr and tidyr.

I would like to take a moment to thank NBC for providing their company training videos through the NBCU Academy YouTube channel. They were an invaluable resource, especially with respect to quickly learning the art of editing and lighting for interview-like content.

This video is part of my submission for the NFL Big Data Bowl 2026, Broadcast Visualization Track. It is worth noting that the rules specifically require any submitted video to be publicly accessible. See host organization Kaggle for further details pertaining to the competition and the data graciously provided by the NFL.