EVERY YARD COUNTS:
A CONVERSATION ON FOOTBALL ANALYTICS

When: Tuesday April 3rd, 2018
Where: Mahar Auditorium
Time: 6:30

This year for ADS annual Sport Talk Series we have a panel to talk about Sport Analytics in football from high school to the NFL. The sports analytics industry has been raging for a few years now but a blanket of mystery remains on the front of football analytics. How can analytics help football teams on and off the field? Our 3 panelist provide a diverse set of perspectives to begin painting the picture of where football analytics is now and where it is going. 
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Who's Coming?

Dean Oliver

       Dean Oliver is a pioneer in sports analytics, working in both basketball and football. He has an established track record of working with decision-makers to identify the right questions and right answers for building a team.
       Dean wrote Basketball on Paper in 2002 and it was published in 2003, only months after Michael Lewis’ Moneyball came out showing how valuable analytics already were in baseball. Basketball on Paper then became the handbook for how to do basketball analytics and Dean became the first analytics consultant in the NBA. He worked with Hall of Fame Coach George Karl, star players, management, and scouts to show how traditional basketball questions could be turned into more clear answers.
       After many successful years in the NBA, Dean joined ESPN when it wanted to build a sports analytics group. Dean guided the group to successful football and basketball metrics, while building relationships internally and externally. The QBR metric has a flexible framework to incorporate as much of a quarterback’s performance as possible, including offensive line performance. His group also built a Pass Protection metric, which has been embraced as a very useful stand-alone tool for evaluating the offensive line. 
       Dean continues and expands his work with TruMedia, an engineering firm that focuses on sports analytics, bringing user-friendly interfaces to the analytics that help teams and media properties understand how the data impacts their decisions and stories.

Diane Bloodworth

       Diane is an entrepreneurial executive with more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry, including a successful startup launch and subsequent acquisition. She has in-depth experience in analytics, software development, IT operations and process improvement through her past roles at IBM and as a consultant. Diane is considered a thought leader in sports analytics. 
       Diane is the founder of Competitive Sports Analysis (CSA), which has become a leading provider of predictive sports analytics. CSA makes the college athlete recruiting process more efficient and effective through analytics that predict the fit of a recruit for a team. CSA's scoutSMART uses a proprietary algorithm that merges quantitative and subjective data to develop a fitSCORE for each recruit based on the program's needs and requirements. 
​       Diane is a sports analytics expert and has spoken at the Great Lakes Analytics in Sports Conference, Titans of Sports Tech Roundtable, Technology Association of Georgia, Georgia Tech Big Analytics Forum, and Ohio State Careers in Sports panel. She has also contributed to publications including Sports Business Daily, Ad Age and Fast Company.

Dan Hatman

       Dan Hatman obtained his Masters in Sports Management at UMass in 2011. While at UMass he worked as the Assistant Defensive Line and Special Teams Coach. After UMass, he was a Pro Scout for the Eagles for two years, looking for NFL caliber talent in the NFL, CFL, AFL and UFL, while also readying scouting reports of upcoming opponents. 
       In 2013, Hatman co-founded Dynamic Sport Solutions, a firm that provided high-end process-oriented solutions to teams and organizations throughout the sports world. He left the firm in 2014 to join The Scouting Academy as the Director of Scouting Development. He is responsible for the creation and execution of a curriculum that teaches a fundamental understanding of the techniques, schematics, and overall principles of each individual football position.