Football’s lessons about Academic and Industry

By Eric Eager, Vice President of Research and Development, Pro Football Focus

Eric Eager

Mathematics is a beautiful vehicle with which to build a career. There is an inherent beauty to the work, and the applications are seemingly endless.

Be that as it may, the profession of mathematics has at times been shoehorned into a confined group of career paths. “What can you do with a math degree?” has often been answered with a small subset of vocations, like high school teacher or actuary. For those of us who took the path a step further, academia was billed as the most noble of pursuits.

As someone who spent six years as a math professor, I can’t disagree with the raw characterization above; having the opportunity to shape young people during their formidable years, while also pursuing one’s own intellectual pursuits really is a dream job. For some.

For mathematics to be a discipline that fully fulfills its societal role, though, it must be a place where people who don’t fit the traditional role of a mathematician, or who evolve from such a role (like I did), can find purpose and meaning.

In this post I want to discuss my transition from academia to private industry, the similarities and differences between my day-to-day lives in both positions, in the hopes that we can continue to cast an increasingly large net for what constitutes the mathematical community moving forward.

My path to being a mathematician was remarkably… usual. I went to undergrad at a small liberal arts school in Minnesota and majored in mathematics. After deciding not to pursue a career in industry after college, I went to graduate school at the University of Nebraska, where I got a PhD in applied mathematics and later joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse. While at UWL I secured a $300,000 National Science Foundation grant to hold an REU in mathematical ecology and was the director of Section NExT – Wisconsin. I had the opportunity to share in the progress of the mathematical community and enjoyed it greatly.

But then my interests, and those of the marketplace at large, changed. While I was teaching, I took part in several consulting opportunities, many of which with the United States Geological Survey. However, as time wore on, the nature of the questions I was being asked to work on evolved—away from my traditional training in dynamical systems and stochastic processes and towards what is now called data science and machine learning. With this new toolkit at my disposal, more opportunities, including working in sports, presented themselves.

In the fall of 2015, I started writing for a website called Pro Football Focus, which had recently been acquired by former Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Cris Collinsworth and had secured data contracts with about a third of the teams in the National Football League and a small number of college football teams. Before too long, the approach to football with a mathematical habit of mind stood out enough for PFF to offer me a full-time position, and in 2018 I finally took the plunge. I was a former academic.

Since joining PFF, the company has grown immensely, as we are now the data and analytics provider for every team in the NFL, over 100 college football teams, all major media entities, and recently secured a sizeable investment from the venture private equity firm Silver Lake to grow our American football business as well as collect and analyze data for other sports like soccer and rugby. I currently serve as the Vice President of Research and Development for PFF, where I run a group of around ten data scientists and analysts, as well as serve as on-air talent for our many media endeavors.

In many ways my role as the VP of R&D at PFF is like the one I had as a professor. I start with a research question and use the tools at my disposal to either solve the problem myself or, as has become increasingly more common, mentor someone else as they solve the problem and enhance their career profile. A problem’s solution is then packaged into a dissemination-ready form, which can often be the catalyst for further research problems.

Live win probabilities supplied to football broadcasts through PFF

The differences between the two processes are where the problem originates from, and how the solutions are disseminated. In academia, the research problems I worked on were motivated by my general curiosity, or that of the people I worked with. That is sometimes the case in industry, but often the problems we work on satisfy the demands of one of our stakeholders, whether they be NBC’s broadcast of Sunday Night Football, one of the team clients, or the consumers who buy a subscription to our website. Dissemination, instead of being a paper or talk at a conference, is a production-ready product that stakeholders can use.

Even when it comes to the process of communicating mathematical ideas to others, there are parallels between academia and my job in industry. Instead of preparing lecture notes for class each day, I work with my producers to prepare information that go into our pregame shows, podcasts and other media. Issues of pedagogy in the classroom are replaced by studies of audience preferences. Teaching evaluations are gone, but comments left on the iTunes podcast app have replaced them. Instead of writing grants to secure funds for undergraduate research students, I’m making budget proposals to hire interns, the nice wave of mathematicians at the interface between football and math.

If my experience is typical, the implications for the discipline of mathematics are immense, and extend beyond just sports. Every industry that hasn’t been disrupted by mathematics will eventually be so, and that industry might very well be in the passion basin of the young people our profession puts into our lives. While this opportunity might be a scary one—we only have our experiences to fall back on when giving people advice—the process of using mathematics to solve problems is the foundation from which everything is eventually built.

Eric Eager is the Vice President of Research and Development at Pro Football Focus, where he provides analysis for all 32 NFL teams, over 100 college football teams and all major media entities. Prior to joining PFF he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin — La Crosse, where he directed Section NExT — Wisconsin and oversaw an REU in mathematical ecology. Eric currently serves the MAA as the Representative-at-Large for the Interests of Business, Industry, and Government.