The Bears have a new director of football analytics
Daniel Greenberg reported that the Chicago Bears have hired Krithi Chandrakasan to be their director of football analytics.
Krithi was with the Kansas City Chiefs for the last 3 years.
Analytics in the NFL has moved well beyond the point where a team hiring a consulting firm to run numbers constitutes outside-the-box thinking.
In fact, most teams don't shy away from analytics. More than one official was offended by the notion that their team would be called «old school». When it comes to player acquisition (which is what Moneyball was based on), the average NFL team is using the data. It's just that it is being used to generate boundaries rather than drive decisions. Teams want to know when they're making exceptions on one player, and they want to know what they might be missing on another they may have otherwise dismissed.
On the coaching side, analytics are generally used to make staffs more efficient. There may only be time for quality-control coaches to break down four or five of an opponent's games in the week they have leading into a particular game. And that, in the past, would lead to guesswork on tendencies and strengths and weaknesses. The data allows the quality-control guys, and staffs, to crosscheck against larger sample sizes. -Albert Breer
