Today, the NFL is continuing their journey to increase the number of statistics provided by the Next Gen Stats Platform to all 32 teams and fans alike. With advanced analytics derived from machine learning (ML), the NFL is creating new ways to quantify football, and to provide fans with the tools needed to increase their knowledge of the games within the game of football. For the 2022 season, the NFL aimed to leverage player-tracking data  and new advanced analytics techniques to better understand special teams.
The goal of the project was to predict how many yards a returner would gain on a punt or kickoff play. One of the challenges when building predictive models for punt and kickoff returns is the availability of very rare events — such as touchdowns — that have significant importance in the dynamics of a game. A data distribution with fat tails is common in

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