NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The Titans are in the midst of an analytics transformation.
They were holdouts from the league’s movement to use data to their advantage in unique ways. They didn’t hire their first employee with an analytics title until the summer of 2021. Now, in president of football operations Chad Brinker, they’ve got a believer at the top who’s got eight people working in five departments in a growing element of the franchise.
“You get all this data, what do you do with it and how does it drive value?” Brinker said. “Those are the questions I’m asking as not only the leader of that department but the football side of it. How can we collect it, clean it and get it in
a place where we can use and bring value to the organization not just in one particular area, but coaching, sports science, personnel, cap. It touches literally everything in football.”
Brian Callahan is happy to see the organization growing analytics and putting it to use not just for games but in a variety of other ways.
"We've hired more staffers, we have more minds, more ideas, more thoughts about what it looks like," he said. "you use it kind of all over the organization too. It's not just a (game) thing. We use it within the scouting program, the scouting process, we use it in the weight room with sports science. So there is a lot of input from all these areas. It's just a matter of how do you aggregate all the data, find what's actionable and how do you use it?"
Brinker and his people are intentional about asking the right questions of the information and they know it can give them productive answers. They won't, for example, be likely to overrate hand size of receivers.
“Does hand size really affect your ability to catch the football?” he said. “As scouts, we’d always like look at that, if you had small hands and you dropped a pass, we’d say, ‘Well see, ‘he’s got small hands.’ If you have small hands do you drop more passes? OK, let’s go see if that’s even true. At the time we ran it and it didn’t really reveal that was the case.”
I sat down with Brinker recently aiming to get a fuller understanding of a few things about a team he calls data-informed, not data-driven:
Who is doing what in analytics for the Titans now, and how does it all tie together? Here’s the bulk of what I learned.