Patriots expected to use ‘more traditional analytic tools’ in football ops, according to Jonathan Kraft
The use of analytics would be a change as Bill Belichick didn't seem to be much of a fan of them.
The Patriots’ decision to replace Bill Belichick with Jerod Mayo won’t just be a swapping of head coaches, but it appears it’ll also serve as a bit of change in approach in football decisions for the organization.
The organization will start to use “more traditional analytic tools” on the “football side” of the team, Patriots president Jonathan Kraft said at the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
“We were so lucky to have Bill the last quarter century because Bill has as good of a set of algorithms as a human being can have in their head, and we benefited from that. Bill was so good, and so much better than his competition at those things, that we didn’t evolve it on the technical side,” Kraft said during the “Future of Football: Innovation on the Gridiron” panel, as transcribed by ESPN’s Mike Reiss.
“Jerod worked at Optum, which is the division of United Healthcare that was bringing technology to traditional health care to try to evolve that business. I think you’ll see us with Jerod, and Eliot Wolf and Matt Groh — who are running our football operations — start to bring more traditional analytic tools. We have them on our business side. We’ll start to bring them to the football side now.”
Belichick was notoriously anti-analytics over the years. During a general manager summit in 2021, Belichick said he wasn’t a fan of analytics, reportedly saying “I’d prefer good players, good fundamentals, and good execution.”
Two years prior, the former Patriots head coach said something similar.
“Analytics is not really my thing. I just try to evaluate what I see,” Belichick told reporters in September 2019. “For me, it’s just trying to evaluate where players are physically, mentally, emotionally in terms of playing football in their career and that’s really what I can go on. Certainly, there’s some other components but, in the end, those are the main things.”
Belichick added in that same press conference that the role analytics played in his in-game decision-making was “less than zero.” In 2016, Belichick said he had “never looked at” an analytics website, adding, “I don’t even care to look at one. I don’t care what they say.”
Belichick’s stance on analytics was reflected in the front office. The Patriots only had one analytics staffer listed as an employee of the team in 2023 (director of research Richard Miller), according to ESPN’s Seth Walder. However, the Patriots’ front office evaluated players “almost entirely without the assistance of analytics,” the Boston Herald’s Doug Kyed and Andrew Callahan reported in October.
Mayo, on the other hand, seemed more willing to use analytics with his coaching decisions.
“I think there’s a place for analytics, for sure,” Mayo told WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show” in January. “At the same time, you would like the analytics to confirm your gut, and sometimes it goes both ways.”
When asked about the common trend of teams going for two after scoring a touchdown while trailing by 14 in that same interview, Mayo said “you never turn down points” but added his decision would depend on ‘how the game’s going.”
Kraft said he felt the team had to hire someone who would take a different approach than Belichick because it’d be difficult for anyone to replicate what the former Patriots head coach did.
“For us, the football side of the building has always been about Bill,” Kraft reportedly said at Sloan. “We’ve been blessed to be in that situation. When you transition from something like that, in any business, you have to go in a very different direction because nobody can be Bill Belichick.”
How analytics will be used in the front office remains to be seen. While Wolf said he’s got final say on roster decisions earlier this week, the team still doesn’t have a general manager. Wolf said his official title is director of scouting, but he’s on an expiring contract and hasn’t been guaranteed chief roster-decision duties yet, Callahan reported. The Patriots are expected to interview candidates for “a high-ranking front office position” after the draft, MassLive reported Sunday.
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