Actually, this kind of thing has been around for a long time. Football Outsiders does game charting and "advanced NFL statistics". People have published paper

Actually, this kind of thing has been around for a long time. Football Outsiders does game charting and "advanced NFL statistics". People have published papers on using artificial neural networks to predict play calling, success rates, even injuries and stuff like that. But this does give us the ability to enrich the data quite a bit. When you watch the live film you really can't see who blew a coverage where or why the safety didn't get to the running back in time to make a tackle. I think if you just watch the TV angles then you might not be convinced that pump fakes actually do anything to confuse the defense. There's a lot to be gained here by statisticians and casual fans alike but it's hard to see that when only 1/3 of the action is visible at any given time.