ViTs for Action Classification in Videos: An Approach to Risky Tackle Detection in American Football Practice Videos

Abstract

Early identification of hazardous actions in contact sports enables timely intervention and improves player safety. We present a method for detecting risky tackles in American football practice videos and introduce a substantially expanded dataset for this task. Our work contains 733 single-athlete-dummy tackle clips, each temporally localized around first point contact and labeled with a strike zone component of the standardized Assessment for Tackling Technique (SATT-3), extending prior work that reported 178 annotated videos. Using a Vision transformer-based model with imbalance-aware training, we obtain risky recall of 0.67 and Risky F1 of 0.59 under crossvalidation. Relative to the previous baseline in a smaller subset (risky recall of 0.58; Risky F1 0.56 ), our approach improves risky recall by more than 8% points on a much larger dataset. These results indicate that the vision transformer-based video analysis, coupled with careful handling of class imbalance, can reliably detect rare but safety-critical tackling patterns, offering a practical pathway toward coach-centered injury prevention tools.