It’s about to be Week 14 of the NFL season, and the stakes and stories in the league are abundant. In a new section of the Yahoo Sports app, Yahoo is hoping it can use AI to automatically capture all of that. The company is launching a new feature called Game Breakdown, which attempts to generate a snapshot of what’s interesting about a game – before, during or after playing.
The game breakdown, which is in beta right now and is only for users who pay for Yahoo’s Fantasy Plus subscription, involves three things. The first is a summary of the game, intended to capture both its most interesting statistics and its biggest stories – not just the typical box-score stuff, but whatever happens to be most interesting now. The second is a running stream of important plays, so you can easily watch the moments that matter. The third is called Prompts, and it contains several suggested follow-up questions (you can’t write your own yet) about what happened in the game. Everything on the page is generated by an AI model, and is constantly updated as the game progresses.
Yahoo isn’t the first company to try to improve game information with AI. ESPN, the Associated Press and others have been doing this for some time, with varying levels of success. These recaps and previews are generally formulaic and straightforward, and include a lot of statistics – a combination of things that is really ripe for AI intervention. But Yahoo is trying to dig a little deeper, says Andrew Machado, head of product for Yahoo Sports. “What are some things people might want to know that aren’t obvious?” he asks. In one demo, he shows me a game preview that includes an injury update to a star player (important for fantasy players!) and some historical context on both teams’ offensive potential. Another shows a bunch of interesting statistics, but misses the game’s bigger story: the long-awaited debut of a much-talked-about player.
Getting this balance right is hard: AI models can extract historical statistics with the best, but it isn’t always able to understand the emotional, human-driven reasons people care about sports. To this end, Machado says his team plans to rely on both Yahoo’s own reporters and its users to help train both app and game breakdowns on what really matters. There’s also a “Sources” section of the breakdown page that takes you to all this content, but it’s largely hidden behind the AI stuff.
The models also identify key plays by looking at what commentators are discussing during the game. “We’ve got all the signals of reactions,” Machado says, “and we’ve got all the signals of win percentage changes. We’re just coming home through the box scores and putting it together in this.”
Machado says that moving forward, as the feature opens up to everyone and to other sports, Yahoo can begin to personalize the breakdown for each user. It can shape the page based on what you find most interesting, which players you like, or even who is on your fantasy team. For now, the tool really likes a esoteric historical comparison – and a betting line.
