Start-up Society #107: The Sports Analytics Issue ⚽️ 🏀 🏈 ⚾️ 🧮 📈

Keeping the American Dream Alive

Published in

Start-up Society

8 min readDec 15, 2022

Welcome to the 107th edition of Start-up Society! This blog highlights some of the most exciting start-ups in the country striving to keep the American Dream alive.

Make sure you check out the previous issue, if you have not already, here!

Whether you are watching the World Cup or tinkering with your fantasy football lineup (unless you’re out of the playoffs), you have probably noticed a trend of “big data” and “advanced analytics” circulating in sports conversations. Today’s article looks to understand how this evolution is disrupting the multibillion-dollar professional sports industry. Sports analytics refers to the use of data and quantitative methods to measure performance and make decisions to gain an advantage in the competitive sports arena.

As we saw in Moneyball, the Oakland A’s had great success, despite a flimsy budget, demonstrating the value of applying quantitative analysis in baseball. Over the years, this quant-style approach has been making its mark in other major sports as well. Join us as we uncover two American two startups changing how teams integrate data and science into their pursuit of winning games and building championship teams.

Florida

SumerSports

HQ: Palm Beach

Founded: 2022

Employees: 18 (on LinkedIn)

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones and his son Jack, a data scientist, hatched up the idea to make a state-of-the-art NFL roster optimization company after years of co-managing a fantasy football team that perennially missed its league finals. The name that they came up with, SumerSports, stems from the word Sumer — the ancient Mesopotamian culture known to have been the first people to use numbers to analyze different systems.
Using analytics, the company is developing technology and algorithms that it hopes will help NFL teams through free agency and the draft so they select the optimal combination of players to form the best roster possible.
The Joneses brought in Thomas Dimitroff, former General Manager of the Atlanta Falcons and a 28-year veteran of the NFL, to run the show as CEO.

‎SumerSports Show on Apple Podcasts

SumerSports aims to provide the best-in-class quantitative analysis aimed at creating precision in player acquisition…

podcasts.apple.com

Paul Tudor Jones (who famously predicted the 1987 stock market crash) likens the advent of data-driven sports decision-making to the rise of quantitative finance, “It’s just so similar to what we do with portfolio optimization in our quantitative trading strategies, so many of the same principles that have been so successful in financial trading, it was really evident to me that they would be perfectly applicable in player selection for an NFL team.”
This is still a very nascent premise in American football. Unlike baseball, which has widely adopted quants running their ball clubs (more on that later), many of these multibillion-dollar NFL teams still operate like they did decades ago. Still, SumerSports is already working with multiple NFL teams and they poached Eric Eager from key rival Pro Football Focus (backed by Silver Lake) to run Research and Development.

MEET THE TEAM

Paul Tudor Jones II, Co-Founder & Chairman

Paul is the Founder, Co-Chairman, and Chief Investment Officer of Tudor Investment Corporation (TIC), which he formed in 1980. TIC is a leading hedge fund specializing in discretionary macro trading as well as model-driven and systematic investment approaches.
Paul’s philanthropic service includes but is not limited to being the Founder and current Board Member of the Robin Hood Foundation, Chairman of JUST Capital Foundation, and Co-Founder and current Board Member of the Everglades Foundation.
Paul holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Virginia (1976) and was awarded an honorary doctorate for his achievements in business and philanthropy from the University of Glasgow (2014).

Jack Jones, Co-Founder & COO

Jack received a B.S. in Human Biology with a Minor in Statistics from Stanford University in 2019. He is currently enrolled at the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences pursuing his Master’s in Data Science.
While enrolled at Stanford University, Jack interned for the San Francisco 49ers as a Football Analyst and Functional Performance Intern.
Jack is a member of the Robin Hood Foundation, a community of next-generation New Yorkers fighting against poverty at its roots.
He earned his Postural Alignment Specialist (PAS) certification from the Egoscue Institute in 2018.

Thomas Dimitroff, CEO

Thomas served as the General Manager of the Atlanta Falcons from 2008 to 2020. Thomas was recognized as the NFL Executive of the Year in both 2008 and 2010.
Prior, Thomas was with the New England Patriots from 2002 to 2007 — becoming a 2× Super Bowl champion (XXXVIII in 2004, XXXIX in 2005).
While at the Patriots, Thomas held the role of National Scout for one year before being promoted to Director of College Scouting, a position he held for five years.
Thomas earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Guelph in 1990.

THE START-UP SOCIETY ASSESSMENT

While ‘quant finance’ has had plenty of buzz over the years, the current reality is these AI-powered funds have generally underperformed and there is still a very strong case in favor of human analysts and managers. However, this reality is not absolute. In fact, the underperformance gap has significantly narrowed since 2020 due to the shift towards value investing and low volatility (see more).
We see a similar trend occurring in sports. While the adoption of analytics has had mixed results in the NFL, we know this approach has proven itself in the MLB and NBA. It should be even more successful in the NFL, as there are significant constraints a football season presents — salary cap, significant injuries, and 53 fixed roster spots (larger than any other major sport) — meaning General Managers need to utilize any sort of resource that would give them a competitive advantage.
SumerSports can help teams organize, standardize, and analyze the profusion of information they already collect internally, but with ancillary analysis to help sort information quickly and elevate roster management to give them that competitive boost.

GO DEEPER

Can AI Analytics Build A Winning NFL Team And Also Improve Your Portfolio?

A Revolution In Sports Data

The Billionaire Hedge Fund Manager Disrupting NFL Analytics

Texas

Zelus Analytics

HQ: Austin

Founded: 2019

Employees: 54 (on LinkedIn)

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Zelus Analytics is a world-leading sports intelligence platform, working directly with teams across the NBA, MLB, NFL, IPL, and NHL, in addition to a number of soccer teams around the globe.
The platform provides a plethora of insights for teams, including but not limited to the examination of various game states and what might cause a shift; value attributions tied to specific events; player projections based on injury and talent; and tools to better inform decision making when it comes to trades, free agency, drafts or in-game strategy.
Zelus is selective about the teams with which it works (no more than 20–25% of the league), to avoid a zero-sum approach where all the teams in a league have access to the same data (unlike Pro Football Focus which sells its data to all 32 NFL teams).
This model helps to preserve the competitive advantage while affording Zelus the financial fortitude to recruit and pay its highly decorated staff, which has grown to more than 50 people — most on the technical side doing such things as data science and engineering — spanning eight countries.
In Greek mythology, Zelus is the god of rivalry (representing the inherent competition in sports) and jealousy (a nod to the company’s exclusivity model).

MEET THE TEAM

Doug Fearing, Co-Founder & CEO

Joining the team in 2015, Doug founded the Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Research and Development (R&D) department, grew it to a staff of 20 over four seasons, and reached the World Series in both 2017 and 2018.
While a faculty member at Harvard and then UT Austin (2010–2015), he was the Senior Advisor to the Tampa Bay Rays R&D team, and he received an MIT SSAC research award in 2013.
Doug received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT in 2010. He earned his B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999.

Luke Bornn, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist

Luke was the Head of Analytics at the Italian soccer club A.S. Roma from 2016 to 2017, afterward, he took on the role of VP of Strategy & Analytics for the Sacramento Kings in 2017.
He received MIT SSAC research awards in 2015 and 2019, and was on the faculty at Harvard College and Simon Fraser University.
He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of British Columbia.

Dan Cervone, Co-Founder & Principal Data Scientist

Dan was the Director of Quantitative Research at the Los Angeles Dodgers from 2018 to 2019. He joined the team in 2016 as a Senior R&D Analyst.
Prior, Dan was a Moore-Sloan Fellow at NYU’s Center for Data Science. He has awards from the MIT SSAC in 2015 and 2019.
Dan also published foundational sports analytics work as part of the XY Research group during his Statistics Ph.D. at Harvard, which he received in 2015.
He earned his B.A. in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Chicago in 2009.

Inderpal Singh, Chief Operating Officer

Prior to joining Zelus, Inderpal founded Northshore Partners, a boutique strategy consulting firm.
Previously, he spent time in executive roles at Bridgewater and HSBC. He also worked as a Strategy Consultant with McKinsey & Company and in Product at Microsoft.
He holds an Honors B.Math in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.

THE START-UP SOCIETY ASSESSMENT

Teams that contract with Zelus can build a complex analytics model, with input from experts in several fields, for a fraction of what it would cost to assemble and pay an in-house staff capable of providing the same value.
Zelus is able to adapt to its clients’ needs. Some of its early baseball clients needed to jumpstart their analytics capabilities entirely, while others had robust departments, but wanted third-party validation or additional perspectives because even statistical models have some degree of subjectivity baked into the original construction.
The hyper-exclusive nature of the business ensures that its clients are getting some sort of “secret sauce” that its competitors are missing out on, making it a rare differentiator.