The NFL has opened up more of its player-tracking data to fans. On Thursday the league launched Next Gen Trends, a free interactive section of its website that turns the tracking numbers it collects on every play into charts showing how the game is changing and what each of the 32 teams actually does on the field.
The tool is built on the same data the league’s stats group has gathered for about a decade, with player locations captured 10 times per second, and runs on Amazon Web Services. What is new is the presentation. Mike Band, the league’s senior manager of research and analytics for the tracking-data group, said the goal was a tool “that is data-vis driven, that is free to fans, and that is approachable so that you don’t have to be an expert statistician or an expert analyst to understand what is being presented.”
“We’ve had and created so many different stats over the years,” Band said in an interview published Thursday. “What we haven’t necessarily done for the fans at home is present it in the most digestible way possible.”
Next Gen Trends is now live!
November 12, 2026
Go beyond the box score to explore team identities, compare tendencies and performance across the NFL, and see how the game is evolving.
Powered by @awscloud
Two views: the league and each team
The section is split in two. League Trends tracks shifts across personnel groupings, play selection, run schemes, pass concepts, coverage and pass rush going back to 2018, and plots every team on a chart that compares how often it uses a tactic with how well it works. Team Trends gives each club what the league calls a “strategic fingerprint” across 28 measures, showing where it differs most from the league average.
Each team page also has a timeline of coaching and personnel changes since 2022, a similarity score that names the teams whose offense and defense play most alike, and a season picture with point differential, offensive and defensive expected points added and playoff odds. The playoff model simulates the rest of the season 10,000 times and updates after every game.
Motion is now on almost two-thirds of snaps
The headline trend is pre-snap motion. League-wide, offenses are using motion on 65 percent of plays this season, up from 46 percent in 2018. The 49ers lead the league at 77 percent and are also the most effective offense with motion, according to the tool, while the Steelers sit at a league-low 51 percent and rank near the bottom in effectiveness. Pittsburgh visits Cincinnati on Sunday night with the AFC North lead at stake.
The other big offensive shift is toward heavier sets. Three-tight-end groupings (13 personnel) are up to 9.5 percent of plays, and two-tight-end sets to 22.3 percent, while the three-receiver look (11 personnel) has dropped to 55.2 percent. The league’s own example is the Rams, who used 13 personnel on 0.3 percent of their plays in 2024 and 30.5 percent in 2025. Run games have moved away from inside zone and toward outside zone.
Defenses have gone the other way from the old single-high look. Split-safety coverage is up almost 12 points since 2018, zone coverage is now played on three of every four snaps, and teams are blitzing more often than they did eight years ago.
| Trend | League average, 2026 | Change since 2018 |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-snap motion | 65.0% | +19.3 pts |
| Outside zone runs | 31.1% | +8.7 pts |
| Inside zone runs | 19.5% | -10.9 pts |
| 11 personnel (three receivers) | 55.2% | -7.2 pts |
| 13 personnel (three tight ends) | 9.5% | +5.9 pts |
| Single-high coverage | 50.2% | -12.2 pts |
| Split-safety coverage | 43.8% | +11.6 pts |
| Zone coverage | 75.4% | +10.0 pts |
| Blitz rate | 32.4% | +5.3 pts |
The league averages that did not move much are just as telling: offenses still call a pass on about 60 percent of plays, use play action on about a third of early downs and run hurry-up tempo on under 9 percent of snaps.
Flores’s Vikings, in a few seconds
Band used the Vikings’ defense to show what the team pages are meant to do. “They’re outliers in a ton of things,” he said of Brian Flores’s unit, which we wrote about before the Bills game. “They run base more than anyone, they blitz more than anyone and they run split safety the second highest rate. They’re zone heavy and they generate pressure no matter with or without the blitz. I got that in a few seconds.”
The playoff page also ranks the coming week’s games by how much they swing the odds. One of the biggest in Week 10 is Vikings at Packers, the game in which Kirk Cousins goes back to Lambeau Field, as our interactive lays out. The model has Minnesota’s playoff chances at 73 percent going in, rising to 88 percent with a win and falling to 64 percent with a loss. Green Bay starts at 62 percent, which would rise to 73 percent with a win and fall to 43 percent with a loss.
Excited to share Next Gen Trends.
— Mike Band (@MBandNFL) November 12, 2026
Really proud of what our @NextGenStats team built with @codeandtheory and @awscloud to make the complexity of NFL schemes easier to understand.
It’s live and free to explore. Let me know what you think.
Why it matters
Teams have had this kind of scheme data for years, and paid services have sold versions of it to fans. A free, official version on the league’s own site makes it easier to check claims like “they never use motion” or “they live in two-high,” and it gives the league another way to keep fans on its own platforms during a season in which TV audiences are up sharply.
“There’s always potential for diving deeper into the pool,” Band said. “We want to create these rabbit hole experiences that even though they’re two pages or maybe 33 pages, if you want to count every team, the ability to continuously find new things is the goal of this experience.”
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