Harvard Alums Take Statistics to the Pros

For many kids, the dream of playing professional sports drives athletic careers. Yet for most people the dream does not work out. Recently, however, a number of Harvard alumni have been blazing a trail for an alternative route to the big leagues: using statistics and skillful networking to place them in the front office of major sports organizations.

Two recent graduates, Jason Rosenfeld ’12 and Daniel Adler ’10 have started to implant themselves in the front offices of teams in two of the biggest sports leagues in the world: the NBA and the NFL. Rosenfeld is the Manager of Basketball Analytics for the Charlotte Bobcats, and Adler is the Assistant Director of Football Research for the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Both are living their dreams, continuing a passion they developed at Harvard while a part of the Harvard Sports Analysts Collective (HSAC), a popular sports analysis club on campus. Other members of HSAC have worked for the Phoenix Suns of the NBA and the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL, as well as other teams and sports-related companies and organizations.

The statistical movement in sports started with baseball. In 1977, Bill James, a janitor who spent his spare time analyzing baseball statistics, published his work and created what is now known as sabermetrics. While at first many people involved in the industry of sports were skeptical, claiming that conventional wisdom trumped the power of statistics, James’ method slowly gained traction throughout the baseball world.

Michael Lewis’ novel Moneyball—published in 2003—tracked the Oakland A’s, a small-market team that managed to make the playoffs through the brilliance of a statistically-inclined general manager and an artfully crafted low-budget team. The book was so influential that it was turned into a movie, starring Brad Pitt, in 2011.

But baseball, based around one-on-one matchups between a batter and a pitcher is much more constrained, and therefore lends itself to more extensive quantitative analysis. Even before James’ statistical revolution, stats like batting average, home runs, and runs batted in have been tracked for well over a century and been part of the sports parlance. But more free flowing sports like basketball and football don’t lend themselves as easily to recording meaningful in-game stats.

“It’s important to keep in mind how much more complicated basketball is than baseball,” Rosenfeld said. “You could create a formula to give you a number [that represents a player’s effectiveness] and that may be effective in baseball, but it might not be nearly as effective [in basketball].”

Take, for example, a touchdown in football. The running back or wide receiver-quarterback tandem gets credit for a TD, but the result is not completely dependent on their play. Offensive lines, other skill players, and play calling all have a role. Similarly in basketball, a basket is generally not scored by the sheer power of one player, but by a symphonic union of five who each influence the play on the floor.

“On any given play [in basketball], if you are trying to figure out what’s good or not, you have to divide credit, and that’s going to be hard. It’s a lot more complicated,” Rosenfeld said.

For this reason, the statistical movement has only recently entrenched itself in these sports. But recently teams across the league are beginning to realize the value added by these analytical thinkers. All the way up to the general manager position, teams are turning to guys who analyze numbers for advice.

“[In] basketball, it’s really the past five-to-ten years where [statistical analysis] has been really mainstream,” Rosenfeld said.

In 2007, Daryl Morey, a former computer science major out of Northwestern University and graduate of the MIT Sloan business school, became one of the first general managers who got to his position by fully embracing sports analytics. He is still the GM for the Houston Rockets and also co-runs the annual MIT Sloan Sports Conference.

While the nature of both Adler and Rosenfeld’s jobs are secretive, the general area that they influence their teams in is through draft analysis along with in-game scenario decision making.

“A lot of the stuff revolves around [game] decisions like if on fourth down, whether to punt or go for a field goal,” Adler said.

In 2005, political economy professor David Romer of UC Berkeley published an article entitled “Do Firms Maximize? Evidence from Professional Football,” which concluded that coaches often tend towards conservative choices that—at least from an analytical perspective—do not provide the best opportunity for winning.

A lot of the sports analytic movement has worked towards maximizing productivity.

“There has been research on the draft on how you value certain draft picks—whether you trade down,” Adler added.

Basketball statisticians have also recently developed stats such as player efficiency ratings (PER) and value added—which dig deeper than just points, assists, rebounds, and turnovers—to rate a player’s true value. Last year, the NBA MVP LeBron James did not actually lead the league in value added; instead, that distinction went to James Harden. While players may not shoot for “value added” titles the way they do for scoring titles, these can often be a more accurate indicator of the impact a single player has on his team’s ability to win.

In front offices, decision-making is often driven by these statistics.

“There are a ton of different decisions that a basketball team needs to make,” Rosenfeld said. “As a fan, you kind of get an idea of what decisions are important for a team… but once you are actually working for a team, you end up with even more questions. Most of the front offices are trying to answer these questions. The difference with me is I—using statistics—try to look at them, hopefully, different than other people.”

In order to attain a lifelong dream, both Adler and Rosenfeld did not get to their positions without hard work. A brief look at Rosenfeld’s resume shows the extensive list of internships and jobs he held before he ended up with the Bobcats. A statistics concentrator at Harvard, he started working in the NBA as an intern in the basketball operations department for the Rockets, working remotely while at Harvard from 2007 to 2009.

Through a series of serendipitous events he became the assistant GM of a Chinese basketball team, the Shanghai Sharks, taking a year off from the college in 2009-2010 to fulfill his duties.

“Unlike the Rockets [job], I was on-site…. That was my life,” Rosenfeld explained.

In the summer after his junior year, Rosenfeld consulted for the Ukrainian national team while they were at the FIBA European Basketball Championships, and finally he was the team manager for the Harvard men’s basketball team last year.

Adler also started early, working as an intern for the New England Patriots the summer after high school. Yet, like many interns at major corporations, he was not immediately doing the glory jobs. He continued to work for the Patriots while at Harvard and even joined the Crimson football team as a team assistant.

From there he bounced between leagues doing remote work for the Cleveland Browns as a “Football Administration Analyst” and working in the MLB labor relations department as a legal and economic intern. He fully credits his ability to land later jobs, however, to his early days with the Patriots.

“The way I fell into the Browns job was because I happened to meet someone when I was graduating high school who works for the Patriots,” Adler said. “I did total grunt work for them and things went from there.”

Before taking the Jaguars job, Adler was enrolled at the Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. He also worked for the Boston Consulting Group for a year.

Both Adler and Rosenfeld emphasized that the most important thing going forward is that they love what they do. They feel as if they are a part of a team and whatever work they put in goes towards helping their team win.

“All we are trying to do is weigh things equally and overcome the human biases,” Adler said.

When his team suited up to play against the Packers two Sundays ago at Lambeau Field, Adler said it was one of the best moments of his career.

“I woke up this morning and I was headed, you know, I was heading over to Lambeau field to go to work,” Adler said. “My job is just pretty amazing. I go to the stadium every day and play around with football stats the whole day, which I would be doing anyway.”