What nine-figure acquisition means for Pro Football Focus, analytics future
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The company ubiquitous in the world of football operations at the collegiate and professional levels is buying the company that’s spent two decades becoming synonymous with analytics.
Teamworks, headquartered in Durham, N.C., and with a business valuation of more than $1 billion, is purchasing the entire Pro Football Focus (PFF) enterprise business but not its consumer-facing content such as PFF’s fantasy football, podcasts and media.
In short, Teamworks is acquiring all of PFF’s football analytics and data to marry with its own operations, name, image and likeness, as well as revenue-sharing and other logistics-centered services. Teamworks, a privately held company, did not disclose terms of what’s been described as a nine-figure acquisition.
“It’s a big deal for Teamworks because the teams we work with will be able to build better products and make them stronger, as we work with every team on some level,” Karim Kassam, Teamworks Vice President of Intelligence and former Pittsburgh Steelers analytics and research coordinator, told USA TODAY Sports. “Where Teamworks has gone, has really been to have a comprehensive solution for football analytics.
“Starting with the All-22 film, churning that into data using computer vision or expert coders that PFF brings to the table, the data quality assurance works better when it is all under one house.”
The goal? To be a one-stop destination for all NFL franchises and Football Bowl Subdivision programs; both Teamworks and PFF already have 100% market share with each entity.
“Fragmented systems have long frustrated teams and limited their ability to transform raw film and player tracking data into competitive insights,” Teamworks CEO and founder Zach Maurides said in a statement to USA TODAY Sports. “The addition of PFF enables us to deliver a vertically integrated and AI-powered football platform so teams can make faster, confidence decisions in the highest-states moments.”
Cris Collinsworth, the PFF CEO, now will join Teamworks in an advisory role, the company shared with USA TODAY Sports.
Initially Pittsburgh’s first head of its analytics program back in 2015, Kassam joined Teamworks two years ago when the company acquired Zelus Analytics. A Harvard alum, Kassam expects this new merger to present previously untapped elements of analytics and data exploration — for both college and NFL teams.
This new synergy will allow the PFF-Teamworks platform to eventually develop new modeling that couples the raw data with the film and increasing elements of analytical components.
Among more recent developments? Tracking officiating crews, down to individual referees’ propensity to flag certain actions. An offensive lineman, for example, not only can study the tendencies of opposing defensive linemen but also that likelihood of being flagged for holding by the various officiating crews.
“Similar for scouting and for R&D (research and development), you can only project so much when you’re looking at yards gained and receptions per receiver,” Kassam said. “But when you can have drops cataloged, route types, yards after catch, that’s also a game-changer in that space.
“I’m a data guy, you think of the amount of information that they’re bringing to the table that they’re adding to Teamworks that increase insights that we’re able to give, and we can link those PFF-curated insights to tracking that’s available, the tracking data that comes from NFL players in the chips they were in their shoulder pads, and at the collegiate level, we generate similar data using computer vision.”
The Teamworks-PFF amalgamation will continue to be the source of analytics and data for NBC’s Sunday Night Football, and Teamworks also is poised to return for Year 2 of its analytics partnership with ESPN’s College GameDay program — now with the PFF acquisition in tow.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Teamworks buying PFF for one-stop football analytics, logistics
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