Last summer, after the Ravens made three analytics hires, I started doing some research for a story on analytics staffing in the NFL. Talked to some folks and learned some interesting things, but it was a little all over the map and we ended up tabling the story for now. (Thread)
NBD, it happens. But with the season coming to a close, wanted to share a few things on the subject in a twitter thread, at least, rather than put them nowhere. Note that these conversations are a few months old at this point.
What I wanted to really know was: is analytics staffing in the NFL on the rise? The answer was a clear yes. NFL director of data analytics @StatsbyLopez told me in September that he estimated analytics staffers had increased by about 20% year over year.
@StatsbyLopez Bills director of football research and strategy Dennis Lock estimated in the summer that numbers had doubled over the prior two years.
The Ravens made three hires, (not a net gain of 3 though, because they lost Eugene Shen to the Dolphins) in @sarah_malle, @SeanfromSeabeck and @YAMiAM9 but they weren’t the only ones making hires last year.
Even the Bengals have a football data analyst listed on their staff now.
I also thought it was interesting that there were 3 team-to-team moves at or to the director level. That’s not unprecedented – previously Mitch Tanney went from the Bears to the Broncos and Sandy Weil from the Ravens to Kroenke S&E – but rare in the nascent NFL analytics field.
The three moves were: Lock from the Dolphins to Bills, Shen from the Ravens to the Dolphins and Taylor Rajack from the Eagles to the Panthers.
“It’s like we’re growing up,” a senior analytics staffer for an NFL team joked at the time.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the flip side: last offseason three higher level analytics staffers – Kevin Meers (Browns), Karim Kassam (Steelers) and Tyler Oberly (Bucs) – left for non-NFL work/school.
Lopez also noted that from 2018 to 2019 the number of women working in football analytics in the NFL grew from 2 (@sarahrunbailey, @nnstats) to 7.
So back to the original question, about the uptick in hiring. Why? I started with the hypothesis that it was simply due to player tracking. The people I spoke with felt like that was a good chunk of the answer but not the whole thing.
First, three non-player tracking reasons I heard:
1. Keeping up with the Joneses. A feeling that other teams are doing data-driven work, causing other teams to feel left behind and wanting to catch up. Increased use of analytics in football media also may have spurred this on.
1. Keeping up with the Joneses. A feeling that other teams are doing data-driven work, causing other teams to feel left behind and wanting to catch up. Increased use of analytics in football media also may have spurred this on.
2. Cross-pollination by non-analytics staffers. A coach/scout/personnel executive moves from one team to another, and notes an effective tool he/she had at their last team that the new team could add.
3. Ownership pushing for quantitative approach. Carolina is probably an example of this.
But the player tracking data was definitely a factor for some teams, too. The sheer scale of the data means that it would be difficult for a one-person shop to build meaningful tools and draw conclusions out of it.
“You know, a couple years ago…you would look in the play by play data and you would get 160 rows per game... With the player tracking data, you go from 160 rows per game to now you’ve got that on a single player on a single play," Lopez said.
An in-between step that multiple people mentioned as a valuable resource was the information teams receive from @PFF. That upped the data quantity from just straight play-by-play, before player tracking upped it even more.
@PFF “Now we have an infinite set of variables, whatever we can think of, on this tracking data for all 22 players. And so the data just over the last five years has changed so significantly,” said Lock.
@PFF In turn, the increased scale means more data processing and data management work is required, thus necessitating more developer-type roles in addition to analysts. Think: this position the Ravens are hiring for: recruiting.ultipro.com/BAL1005BARLP/J…
A notion I heard was: analytics folks already had full-time jobs before player tracking came around. They couldn’t drop all the other work and focus entirely on player tracking…and that’s the kind of effort it needs. Hence, for some clubs, more hires.
I’ll caveat this next part by saying that no one has a perfect sense of what their competition is doing with NGS and that things may have shifted for some teams since last summer (especially given the hiring uptick) but the feeling at the time I heard was:
“I would suspect that most clubs are struggling to get their arms wrapped around it,” Sandy Weil, former director of sports analytics at Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, said in the summer.
“I’d say pretty comfortably that probably over half aren’t doing meaningful work (with player tracking). But that’s probably something that’s likely to change,” added one high-level analytics staffer for an NFL team, also last summer.
Another high-level staffer guessed only a small fraction of teams had really gotten into it as of that time.
One factor that is likely accelerating the adoption of player tracking: the Big Data Bowl. It helped illuminate what was possible with player tracking and also exposed a set of possible recruits for teams.
Out of the inaugural event, 11 participants were hired by NFL teams, the league or third-party NFL player tracking vendors, per Lopez.
(That's not counting @chuurveg or @CausalKathy, who were BDB winner/finalist and later hired by Seattle NHL and the Toronto Raptors, respectively)
@chuurveg @CausalKathy The league ran back the event this season in the form of a competition. The winners and other finalists will present to teams at the NFL Combine again.
I think that’s all. Thanks for reading.
I’m still on leave with our newborn son, so I’m going back to that now! Happy Super Bowl week.
I’m still on leave with our newborn son, so I’m going back to that now! Happy Super Bowl week.
