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Meet the tech company using motion sensors to track NFL players

If you've watched a football game in the past two years, you've heard the broadcasters mention some kind of compelling number and cite it to "NFL Next Gen Stats." The number could be about, say, the speed at which a player ran, or the "closing distance" between a receiver and the defender that caught up to him. All of those numbers come from an unlikely source: motion sensors inside the shoulder pads of the players on the field.

The motion sensors communicate with a radio-frequency (RFID) system put in place by Zebra Technologies (ZBRA), which partnered with the NFL in 2014 to launch in 18 stadiums. Now, Zebra's tracking technology is in every NFL stadium, plus Aloha Stadium in Hawaii (home of the Pro Bowl) and London's Wembley Stadium (where three NFL games were played this year).

This was the second full season that the NFL used Zebra's tech to glean the kind of insights that cater to stat-heads and fantasy-football obsessives. And the data doesn't just show up on the TV at home—if you're at a game in person, much of the stats on the Jumbotron, such as numbers from the line of scrimmage before a play, come from Zebra. The NFL uses also Zebra's data on its own apps and sends it to third-party providers for devices like Xbox, on which you can double-click a player to see stats in real time. Zebra says some teams also use its insights for coaching purposes.

So, how does the technology actually work? Small sensors embedded in the shoulder pads, about as big as a quarter and weighing just three grams, emit a signal beacon to other sensors around the stadium, which triangulate the signal to pinpoint the location of a player within a 6-inch accuracy. And the sensors send out those beacons many times per second.

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If you're a baseball fan, this all might sound like Statcast, the technology Major League Baseball uses to show viewers stats such as the speed of a pitch or how hard a ball was hit. Zebra's technology wouldn't work for that, because baseball is hit much faster than a football player is hit by another player—at a speed too fast for a motion sensor and better suited to high-speed video camera.

Using Zebra's tech, the NFL can see how fast a player accelerated or how close a cornerback was to a receiver and how quickly he closed the gap. "So, if you've got a wide receiver, Anquan Boldin from San Francisco, and he's being covered by Richard Sherman," explains Zebra VP Jill Stelfox, you can answer questions like, "What's the closing distance between those two players, and what's the speed at which he's traveling?"

The funny thing about Zebra providing this technology is that the 47-year-old company, which went public in 1991, traditionally never had any involvement in sports. Zebra provides enterprise solutions like shipping-label printers, mobile scanners (such as the ones you see at Avis when you return a rental car) and Wi-Fi routers to major Fortune 500 companies. Three years ago, Stelfox says, "We kind of put our heads together and talked about where we could enter a market where this technology would really be meaningful and provide some amazing insights with the data. And it's funny, we came up with this football idea." (It bears mentioning that a small Massachusetts-based company, Lynx System Developers, sued Zebra last June, alleging Zebra stole the motion-tracking technology; the lawsuit is still active and Zebra would not comment.)

In 2014, Zebra spent $3.5 billion to acquire a unit of Motorola Solutions that focused on tracking technology. Integrating that business, CEO Anders Gustafsson tells Yahoo Finance, "has been a major undertaking for us. But we’ve had a lot of CIO customers tell us they now perceive us to be more strategic."

Next up, Zebra will slip its sensors right into the footballs themselves. The company has partnered with Wilson to test that idea and has already done it in a few individual games.

Zebra's core business is still printers, and it remains a company that most consumers don't know about and don't need to know about. "From a brand awareness perspective, if you ask the average person on the street, they wouldn't be familiar with Zebra," Gustafsson says. "But people in our industry know us very well."

Nonetheless, Zebra's tech will be on display Sunday in front of nearly 15 million viewers (last year's game averaged 14.4 million) on CBS during the Super Bowl, even if the only "zebra" that football fans know is the term for referees.