The Era of the Analytics General Manager is Here
Younger, more analytically savvy front office personnel are now claiming the top jobs throughout the NFL
The final-four franchises this season are not only clearly in the top-five teams, they also help tell the story of the rise of analytical thinkers in the NFL. On one side of the bracket, you have two of the top quarterbacks in the NFL facing off. One the other, you have a late-second round pick and a seventh-round rookie taking the field, both surrounded by a wealth of talent.
The Kansas City Chiefs and Cincinnati Bengals have found their paths to the highest levels of the NFL a very traditional way: draft a top player at the most important position.
The Philadelphia Eagles and San Francisco 49ers have built their juggernauts in a much different way, playing elite defense and enhancing offensive performance by leaning into the rushing skills of there less talented signal-callers, and surrounding them with weapons and strong offensive lines.
It should come come as no surprise then that these two cohorts of team-building also have constructed their respective front offices quite differently. According to the NFL analytics staff chart maintained by ESPN’s Seth Walder, the Chiefs and Bengals only had a total of three dedicated analytics positions, as of the previous offseason, whereas the Eagles and 49ers have eight people filling those roles.
In addition to investing heavily in analytics staffers, the Eagles and 49ers have a strong presence of non-traditional backgrounds near the top of the front office (Assistant GM Alec Halaby was previously called the Eagles former “analytics safeguard”) and have functioned as training grounds for two of the most analytics-friendly general managers in the NFL: Andrew Berry and Kwesi Adofo-Mensah.
At the top of the Eagles operation is Howie Roseman, a former cap analyst who worked his way up the ranks by learning the scouting side of personnel, despite never playing the game, and then built out one of the earliest and strongest research departments in the NFL.
Roseman is the odds-on favorite for Executive of the Year, after engineering a trade for A.J. Brown in the offseason, bolstering the secondary and defensive line with a number of valuable acquisitions in-season, and seeing the development of Jalen Hurts, a much-maligned selection three years ago that showed his understanding of evaluation uncertainty. This would be the second award for Roseman, who first won in 2017 after winning the Super Bowl with a journeyman quarterback in Nick Foles.
The correlation of analytical investment and team success isn’t limited to the NFC’s two remaining contenders. Using Walder’s chart, there was an average of 3.1 staffers per NFL franchise last offseason, a numbers that jumps to 4.4 looking at only the final eight teams in the Divisional Round.
The New York Giants have gone from hiring a few “computer folk” to first-year general manager Joe Schoen equipping the front office with seven analytics staffers. The Buffalo Bills, Schoen former team, have six staffers, and after a disappointing exit are still the betting favorites to win the Super Bowl next season. The epicenter of the largest seasonal leap is in Jacksonville, where they have seven people on the staffer chart, including Tony Khan, the owner’s son, who has been building a strong analytical organization for years, even if their voices were silenced during the Tom Coughlin era.
In a copycat NFL, other organizations will have to take notice of the relative success of analytically forward teams, and then look to prioritize those traits in general manager hires. Ran Carthon, the new Tennessee Titans general manager, comes from the 49ers and is saying all the right things about how he plans to enhance the teams operations with analytics, after his predecessor Jon Robinson usually become openly hostile to the mention of the word.
Monti Ossenfort, the Arizona Cardinals new GM, brought up the value of analytics unprompted while discussing roster building, avoiding the usual reflective instinct of front office personnel to downplay its value.
Carthon’s hire in Tennessee could be especially impactful, as the Titans were ranked by NFL analytics staffers as the least analytically advanced team. This from ESPN’s Walder, who conducted the survey:
That Tennessee and Washington have small analytics groups -- just one staffer each, to the best of my knowledge -- and their work isn't well known to their peers is a negative indicator. It doesn't rule out heavier quantitative involvement that isn't known to the outside, but when asked which teams are further behind from a data-analysis standpoint, those two teams are consistently brought up.
The last two hiring cycles have shown the acceleration is openness to analytics at the highest ranks, with Adofo-Mensah, Schoen and Chicago Bears GM Ryan Poles all making sure to, at least, respectfully discuss the value of analytics in their decisions.
Perhaps the most important person in establishing the nerd-to-NFL-front-office pipeline has been Michael Lopez, the NFL’s Senior Director of Football Data and Analytics. It was a great sign when the NFL created an explicit data and analytics position in 2018, and the hiring of Lopez has been a grand slam (sorry for the mixed metaphors).
One of Lopez’s signature initiatives has been the establishment of the Big Data Bowl, which opened up NFL tracking data to the public, allowing contestants to pick a theme and answer critical football questions with a combination of data insights and institutional knowledge.
The ability of NFL teams to see real-world usage of the very tracking data they all have access to has vastly simplified the hiring process, dropping barriers of technical knowhow on the part of hiring managers, and leading to a more meritocratic evaluation, which too often had been simply hiring an Ivy leaguer with the right major. From 2022 Big Data Bowl contestants alone, there were eight hires by teams and NFL vendors.
As nerds, we often lament at the backwardness of the NFL in relation to the MLB or NBA, but that is quickly changing. The GM hiring cycles are putting the right perspectives at the top of front offices, the most analytically forward teams are succeeding, and the NFL is making it easier for teams to implement their plans of expanded research capacity. After a lot of waiting, we are now in the NFL’s analytics era.
Really great insights into the NFL's accelerated transition. I wrote about this years ago in relation to the Cowboys and how the "analytics window of opportunity" would be closing as more teams embraces ideas once held by only a few teams. Now, if you're not using analytics, you're clearly at a competitive disadvantage because you're decision-making simply doesn't have all the inputs that others do.
https://www.bloggingtheboys.com/2019/11/26/20983420/the-dallas-cowboys-have-an-analytics-problem