Read an excerpt from 'Football is a Number's Game' featuring Vikings GM
Matthew Coller's new book is out now. Read a chapter that includes Vikings GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah
By Matthew Coller
Hey there Purple Insider followers, it’s an exciting day. My new book, Football is a Number’s Game: PFF and How a Data-Driven Approach Shook Up The Sport is finally out.
I spent around 18 months reporting on Pro Football Focus and its influence over the analytics revolution in the NFL. Where did PFF come from? What do they do for teams? How have analytics changed football? Did I stumble upon football’s Billy Beane? Oh, and I discovered the fascinating story of a business that was blowing up and hitting some rocky times.
The story focuses on the journey of Neil Hornsby, a football fan from England with an unusual curiosity, who originally built PFF with other fans that he met on message boards. He wanted better insight about the game than what box scores provided but only started PFF as a fun project because he enjoyed the sport. It wasn’t until he got interest from the New York Giants that things took off. He began building a company, which he eventually sold to broadcaster Cris Collinsworth. PFF then started working with many teams and was at the center of the NFL adopting analytics. Neil led the company to a place where it was worth $160 million but the success came along with plenty of challenges. Along the way, many lives were changed and the way NFL teams operate was shifted in a major way.
ORDER THE BOOK HERE to read the complete story of PFF and how football will never be the same because of it.
Below is part of a chapter titled “The Analytics GM,” which focuses on Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and how PFF played a role in him coming to prominence in the NFL.
Enjoy….
When Kwesi Adofo-Mensah was introduced as the general manager of the Minnesota Vikings, he was ready for all the questions about his background.
Throughout the interview process, he had been painted as the “analytics” candidate because of his degrees from Princeton and Stanford and his work on Wall Street trading energy commodities before taking a swing at his dream job working in professional sports in 2013. Adofo-Mensah went to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference looking for any chance to get his foot in the door. There he was introduced to San Francisco director of football administration and analytics Brian Hampton and was eventually hired by the 49ers as a researcher. Over a period of six years, Adofo-Mensah climbed the ladder to director of football research and development and caught the eye of Cleveland Browns general manager Andrew Berry, who hired him as the vice president of football operations. When Adofo-Mensah was named GM by the Vikings in January 2022, he became the first person with a background purely rooted in analytics to be given the keys to an organization. There were others who had histories outside of being a football scout, coach, or player, but none like him. The 40-year-old’s laugh echoed throughout the Vikings’ practice facility when the question about being the “analytics guy” finally came. He made it clear that he wanted no part of that label.
“I remember when John [Lynch] and Kyle [Shanahan] came to San Francisco, we had a meeting where everybody goes around the room and introduces themselves, and I took that opportunity to stand up and say, ‘I don’t know what analytics is,’ and I think I might’ve laid an expletive in there so I could be extra Football Guy,” Adofo-Mensah said. “For me, it’s about being thoughtful and intentional.”
Cleveland Browns GM Andrew Berry also tried to move away from using the term “analytics” as a way to describe what Adofo-Mensah would be bringing to his new team.
“I think actually a little bit too much is made about the whole analytics stigma, so to speak,” Berry said. “I think any high-functioning office, whether it’s in the NFL or across other sports, looks to bring different perspectives to the table with decision-making. And using a variety of sources of information, weighing them accurately, allows the decision maker in any space—whether it’s on roster decisions or game-day decisions or medical/performance decisions, contract-management decisions, you name it—allows you to really make the best choice for the organization.”
Twenty years after Michael Lewis wrote Moneyball, the story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane and his unique approach to using statistics that changed the way the sports world viewed applying data to sports, it would be unfathomable for a baseball or basketball general manager to downplay his or her background in numbers. In those sports, anyone without a degree in data science or economics would have to explain to the world how they planned to lean into widely accepted analytical concepts. The last thing you would want to be labeled in Major League Baseball or in the National Basketball Association is “old school.
In the football realm, Adofo-Mensah still felt it was important to explain to everyone that he’s just a very educated Football Guy. He talked about learning to write scouting reports when he was in Cleveland. He explained the influence of legendary 49ers head coach Bill Walsh’s coaching philosophies had on him. He said it was cool to work with Tom Rathman, an ex-fullback who would rank among the all-time most Footbally Football Guys ever. Adofo-Mensah also tried to make it known that scouting was very important to him, as were opinions of players. Again, these things would not be questioned in the NBA or MLB.
Adofo-Mensah’s hire and introductory press conference acted as the perfect snapshot to explain where analytics fit into the landscape in the NFL in 2022. The lack of consternation surrounding his hire in mainstream NFL media signified how far football has come in the previous decade when it came to the acceptance of analytics. But there is still a strong urge to hold onto the idea that the Football Guys know best. The Vikings have only a few employees dedicated to analytics and data, while some baseball teams have dozens. Data is winning, but it hasn’t completely won over the NFL yet.
When Adofo-Mensah was climbing the ladder, he knew that he had to find ways to use data to connect to the Football Guys. He turned to PFF.
“The one superpower that I do have is that I’m one of the most curious people you’ll ever meet, so if you give me information, I can go use numbers because numbers is my love language, that’s how I teach myself things,” Adofo-Mensah said over the phone. “Using PFF to teach myself things that, frankly, I didn’t know. I knew a fan level, but I had to sit in a room with Vic Fangio and Ed Donatell and Kyle Shanahan and Mike Shanahan and John Lynch and try and understand and keep up with them. How I did that was, I’d take ideas that they would teach and I’d go to the numbers and communicate that way. In doing that, I’d find something that maybe they didn’t know or communicate it to them and show them how it works in my language. That’s how I built a relationship with those guys. That’s ultimately PFF.”
Adofo-Mensah used the example of trying to understand the impact of play-action (plays that are designed to look like runs but end up being passes) the same way an offensive coordinator would and then being able to add something to the conversation.
“PFF really allows somebody to go deep and study that for themselves,” Adofo-Mensah said. “Now, a play-caller knows exactly why [it works], because you’ve put people in run-pass conflict and all that stuff, but being able to go through and say, hey first-and-10, second-and-6, the different coverages you get in that situation and is that why? It allowed me to not just do that ‘what’ but go dig on the ‘why’ and learn some of these coordinators who have been play-calling for 20 years know for sure. It allowed me to derive it for myself in a language that I understand.”
Around 2015, Adofo-Mensah came across a way that he could bring something fresh to the table that coaches and management would value: PFF’s college football data—the same data Cris Collinsworth had pushed his team to collect when he took over the company in 2014.
“You’re trying to build college models and you start building combine models and you can only get to a certain point and you’re like, ‘OK, this is good, but I want to help more,’” Adofo-Mensah said. “So you go looking for sources.” While many around the NFL were hesitant about using outsiders’ grades for players, the new Vikings GM dug deep into PFF’s grading data to look for numbers that correlate higher with success.
“It always fascinated me that people looked down on the plus-minus model, but I’d go in our coaches’ offices and they have a book full of plus-minuses,” Adofo-Mensah said. “Well, it seems like they’re doing the same thing our coaches do…. They don’t exactly know what the person is designed to do, but that’s OK as long as that bias is true for everybody they do. As long as they don’t know one team better than [another], the randomness and error is going to come out in a wash…. We undertook a lot of validation exercises to see where we thought it was strong, where it could get better and in the beginning we used what we thought we could use and as it got better we grew with them.” “I do more with PFF grades than most people do,” he added.
Growing with PFF also means that everyone else in the NFL has too. In 2015, Adofo-Mensah was ahead of the curve. Now the analytics arms race is on. Teams are scooping up data scientists and PFF is creating more products for them to use, like their IQ system (which, if you remember, pulls in all the PFF data to predict future outcomes for prospects and current players). “I meet with [PFF] at every combine and I’ll look across the table like, ‘I love you guys, but I wish you would stop at some point because that cool idea, now 31 other teams are going to have access to it,’” Adofo-Mensah said. Adofo-Mensah does warn that data in the wrong hands can be a “weapon of math destruction” wherein people use PFF’s statistics to confirm what they already believe rather than aiming to learn from the numbers. “For the people that generally want to search for truth and objective information and help them learn and gain insight,” Adofo-Mensah said. “If there’s a football Nobel Peace Prize, they probably deserve it. It’s helped a lot of things.”
I've also purchased this book about football and numbers. I have to support my favorite Vikings podcaster/writer!
I have received my copy of Football is a Numbers Game and can confirm it is most definitely a book about football!