Great Sports Illustrated profile by Albert Chen of some of the brightest stats minds (and good guys) in the NFL. Check it out:
In recent years NFL teams started to get smarter. M.B.A. graduates from elite universities began infiltrating football front offices as they had baseball's in the mid-2000s, but the brain power was devoted to salary-cap management and personnel decisions. There was one area in which teams remained stuck in flat-earth thinking: game strategy.Burke believed this would change—that in an information age in which advanced stats had the power to predict a presidential election to the decimal point, new math would be impossible for the Football Men to ignore. He believed the revolution would reach the field, that the game was "reaching a tipping point where one coach would buy into the analytics approach. And if that coach were successful, there would be an avalanche."