The NFL and Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled a new statistic this week to help rank the league's most prolific quarterbacks based on their decision-making.

executive guide

AWS: The complete business guide to Amazon's cloud services

A few brilliant strokes of ingenuity, combined with a large dose of capitalism, made the e-retailer into the world's cloud services leader.

The team behind Next Gen Stats (NGS) created the "Passing Score" statistic to assess whether a quarterback made the optimal decision after the play. The NFL said dozens of quarterback evaluation metrics exist but they all miss out on isolating the specific variables a quarterback must evaluate before a passing play. 

Josh Helmrich, NFL Director of strategy and business development, toldZDNetthat AWS and the NFL worked together to combine 7 different machine learning models and several play variables to create the Next Gen Stats Passing Score.

"With the NFL playoffs fast approaching, we want to deliver fans an increased depth of analysis, more context, and additional ways to understand one of the most important positions in sports -- the NFL quarterback. This new metric will help fans better understand the quarterback's passing performance, relative to his decision, on each play," Helmrich said.  

"The quarterback position is much more complex than just the outcome of the play. To help understand the quarterback's decision-making and all the variables that go into it, we spent over a year developing the components that make up the Next Gen Stats Passing Score."

In a blog post , AWS and the NFL explained that quarterbacks make hundreds of split-second decisions based on how the defense is lined up, the time remaining in the game, and the yards needed for a first down or touchdown. 

To illustrate the statistic's accuracy, AWS ranked the performances of quarterbacks in 2021, finding that Aaron Rodgers, Joe Burrow, and Matthew Stafford were the only players with scores above 90. Ryan Tannehill, Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, and Tom Brady weren't far behind with scores above 88. 

Dak Prescott, Kyler Murray, and Jimmy Garoppolo all had 87s. Jalen Hurts, Derek Carr, and Mac Jones had scores above 82. Ben Roethlisberger was 14th on the list with a 70 and is the only quarterback over the last four seasons to get to the playoffs with a score under 82.

Despite hundreds of variables affecting the outcome of a play, the statistical credit or blame is always assigned to the quarterback. AWS ML Solutions Lab's Priya Ponnapalli toldZDNetthe machine learning technology and data analysis tools used to create the Passing Score will help viewers understand the game and the decisions made by quarterbacks. 

"NGS spent nearly a year solving a series of complex technology problems to create the Passing Score tool," AWS explained. 

"Building on years of creating and deploying AWS-powered machine learning (ML) models, the NGS engineering and analytics team worked with the AWS Professional Services data science group to optimize and combine seven ML models, including a new model to predict the value of a pass before the ball is thrown. The combined ML models power the new NGS Passing Score. Each individual model provides compelling insights into what's happening on the field, like predicted yards and completion probability. By combining the models, a score (a number between 50