Episode 2: Tyler Phillips • Stay Ahead with Elite Data

Today, we welcome Tyler Phillips to discuss the role of Pro Football Focus (PFF) in providing comprehensive football data and analysis, which is utilized by NFL and NCAA teams for various purposes including game planning, player evaluation, and roster building.

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Luke & Tyler highlight the evolution of data usage in college football, the transition of NFL practices to the college level, and the importance of partnerships in enhancing the utility of data. Phillips emphasizes the significance of data-driven decision-making in modern football and how teams are increasingly adopting sophisticated analytics to gain a competitive edge.

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Moneyballers dives into conversation with the brightest minds behind the emerging world of the College Front Office. Presented by Dropback

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Full Transcript

Luke Bogus (00:01.892)
Tyler, what's up, man? Thanks for joining the podcast.

Tyler Phillips (00:04.172)
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you having me.

Luke Bogus (00:06.202)
Dude, yeah, this is gonna be a lot of fun. Obviously, PFF is huge in the space, but maybe for those who don't know, what is PFF and why is it trusted by literally every single FBS team in the country?

Tyler Phillips (00:17.388)
Yeah. So PFF is really the leader in football data and analysis. So we are home to the most in-depth and comprehensive football database in the world. Really for two decades now, we've been compiling this play data for all major levels of football, whether that be NFL, whether that be FBS, FCS, we're even doing alt leagues like the CFL and the UFL. For the most part, when people hear about PFF, they think about our consumer side on pff.com and

We do a lot of great work there, whether that's access to our premium stats, which is essentially like a scaled down version of our entire football database. We also have like fantasy tools with integration with your, your lead provider to, for start and sit decisions or betting tools for key insights on some of the upcoming matchups each week and articles really with like analysis and context that you don't really get elsewhere. The second thing I'd say that.

people think about whenever they hear PFF is our grades, our zero to 100 grades. So whether that's they've seen them on pff.com or they've seen that I'm on X or Instagram or even on Sunday Night Football underneath the intros for every player where they rank positionally on those broadcasts. those grades can be polarizing at times. They're definitely, I would say conversation starters. But what people don't always know about PFF is that, you know, our grades and frankly, like,

more importantly, the hundreds of data points that we are collecting are being used by all of their favorite teams. So whenever I say all of the teams and you kind of hit on at the beginning is we work with all 32 NFL teams, 136 FBS teams. And that number is growing this year with a couple FCS teams going up from the FCS to the FBS. So all of those teams are trusting our data, whether that be grades, but like I said, more importantly, the hundreds of data pieces and

points of data that we collect on every play. And really just powering the behind the scenes of football across the entire football ecosystem.

Luke Bogus (02:20.88)
Yeah, well, it's kind of fun to that like consumers get access to basically what, you know, a watered down version, but essentially the same thing that their favorite teams do. Data is awesome. Like who doesn't want data, but like why, like why does a grade matter? Why does all the data points matter? Like what are maybe some of the key ways that they're using this data and their day-to-day workflows, these NFL teams or NCAA teams.

Tyler Phillips (02:41.922)
Yeah, so there's a few different ways that they're using it. I guess I should start with like where they're using it. So one would just be in-house, raw data, they're able to touch it, use it in its raw form and either in their own homegrown systems. The second would be within their video system. So for football teams, that's been the lifeblood of an organization where these teams live out of and our data is viewable there and actionable within those platforms.

Then the third is PFF Ultimate. So Ultimate is, there's a little bit of mystique around it. It's not necessarily available to the average consumer. For the most part, it is a team-facing solution of ours. And essentially what it is, it's a reporting suite and a data visualization platform that helps display all of the data that we collect. It's overwhelming at times, you jump on, the first thing you see is 280,000 plays in the right-hand corner. And that's everything that we broke down for

for college football last year. So really it's just a visualization front end system to allow teams to go in and leverage and utilize that data. So that's really the where, as far as the how, it's almost limitless, the application of the data. I'll focus primarily on the ultimate side whenever I talk about it. There's three main pillars on how teams are leveraging it. One would be game planning. So teams are using it to...

scout their upcoming opponents, looking for different strengths, looking for different weaknesses, looking for tendencies for these teams on is there something that they're doing on third and long or second and short as to where they can pick that up and incorporate it into their game plan to find an edge, right? And then there's also the self-scout perspective. So not only what they can find out about their opponents, but also what they can find out about themselves because that's everything that their opponents can see on them.

So it's kind of the game within a game on that aspect. The second would be roster building and player evaluation. So we have data on every single player, every play of every game and our database for the NFL goes back to 06. So we allow you to view that objective data within Ultimate. So we also have our own insights and data science work that we sprinkle and layer in over top. But at the end of the day, we really give you the option to,

Tyler Phillips (05:04.128)
leverage our insights or just take that objective data and make it your own. For NFL, that's evaluating potential free agencies or roster decisions on their own side. Second biggest aspect there is the NFL draft, right? So like I said, we collect data on every FBS and FCS player. So they're taking that data and that's informing some of their draft decision-making strategies. And really, they're keeping tabs on everyone. Even if they don't select that player in the draft, they're going to see them on Sundays.

So they want to have data on every single player. And it really starts when they hit college and having that data to fall back on as they grow and progress through the league. For college, it's really quickly mirroring what we see at the NFL level, keeping tabs on everybody, whether that's somebody on their team or somebody they're going to see on Saturdays. The transfer portal obviously has changed a lot and really changed the landscape of all of college football. So our data is really being leveraged there. Hey, does this player

Can he play here? Does he fit what we're trying to do? Does he fit our scheme? Things like that. Our data is helping to inform that decision making. Then the third pillar would really just be, especially at this time of year, off season studies, teach tapes. We want to get better as a team at running outside zone so they can use our platform to go in and say, who ran outside zone the best? And that could be a starting point for their off season studies and teach tapes. And trying to get better for the next season, inverse.

Hey, we want to get better at stopping outside zone. That was a weak spot on our team last year. They can find the inverse. Who was the best at preventing and stopping the outside zone run and take bits and pieces to incorporate and just really get better.

Luke Bogus (06:45.198)
Yeah, that's incredible. I would love dive into that second point a little bit more around like

roster building, roster construction. maybe walk me through, you alluded to like, this is what the NFL has been doing for a while. Now it's transitioning to college sports. It kind of seems to be a theme. Like, you know, the classic stories when Nick Saban came to Alabama, he took what, you know, he had at Miami in the NFL style personnel office and basically built that out in Alabama. They went on a tear. Everyone started doing it. We're starting to see a similar wave where you're having people like Bill Belichick come in as a head coach. They are bringing in GMs and front office folks. Like maybe zooming out a little bit, like

how have you kind of seen NFL teams and, or how have you kind of seen college football teams start to adopt a lot of the stuff that NFL is doing? What are the data sources that they're viewing and using? Just maybe walk me through that transition between like how college is being inspired by the NFL.

Tyler Phillips (07:38.734)
For sure. Yeah. So as far as like utilizing our data, it's a tough one on how they do it just with teams. They're so guarded, right? And for that's for good reason, because that's their edge. If everybody has access to this data, quickly doesn't become, know, how are the, you know, what data do we have? Everybody's on the same playing field. So it becomes, what do you do with it? How are they using it? How are they leveraging it? Because that becomes their edge. And more generally speaking, terms of just technology and adoption at the college level in general, I think teams,

are getting ahead, they're the ones that are really leaning into this new technology that continues to enter the space seemingly every single day. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're going out and using absolutely everything, but what they're doing is they're really maximizing what they have at their disposal and the tools that they do have. They're really just squeezing those platforms for everything that they can offer them. And they're the ones that are not getting stuck in the, well, we've always done it this way. They're the ones that are a little bit more open-minded and

understanding the change can certainly be disruptive, right? Like that's just natural. But once you pull that band-aid and you identify ways to incorporate this new technology into your workflow, that's when you can really start to increase efficiency and pull ahead. everyone has the same amount of time. So it really just becomes how can you maximize that time?

Luke Bogus (09:00.73)
Totally. I'm curious, like, have you seen any specific examples of how maybe college football teams are using PFF today differently than they used it five years ago or even 10 years ago? Like, obviously the clients have grown in the last five, 10 years for y'all, but like, I'm curious if there's like any, you know, specific ways that they're leveraging the platform that's, you know, kind of gearing those teams up for the new era of college sports here.

Tyler Phillips (09:23.618)
Yeah, seemingly changes overnight, right? Especially with everything coming down with college football and just the organization of it and how it's going to look over the next, how it's looked three, four, five years ago compared to today. then planning for the future of what it's going to look like, not only in April, but next April and five, 10 years down the road. The biggest trend that I can recall just seeing is just the different titles that we've seen enter the staffs.

Couple of years ago, it wouldn't be completely out of the ordinary to see a director of analytics or sports performance has become like really big over the last couple of years. you know, it wasn't crazy to see those types of titles. Now it is become like everybody has it. We started seeing when the NIL was introduced, you know, we saw NIL directors actually on staff and we kind of took a look like, oh, that's interesting. Obviously at that point.

Collectives were the ones for the most part managing that NIL aspect. But to see representation actually on the staff was kind of an eye opener for us. Like, wow, had like, teams are really gonna lean into this and it's gonna change how they operate. And that's the biggest shift. Teams are just starting to operate more and more like NFL front offices would operate. And I think this off season, we've seen that probably more than ever. Just with the nature of what you mentioned at the top of the certain coaches coming down to the college level, whether that be former coaches,

and the NFL, former players in the NFL, GMs that have taken these head coaching jobs at the college level, taken these GM jobs at the college level. And that's the same dynamic that we're used to seeing at the NFL level between the head coach and GM. And beyond that, just NFL personnel, non-coaches, like off the field type coaches, we're seeing these folks get hired on the operations and the legal side. And the writing on the wall for the reason for that is just they're

they're bringing in these seasoned experienced professionals to implement that professionalization of college football, know, instill those core principles and lay the foundation for what the future of a college football program is going to look like.

Luke Bogus (11:29.988)
Yeah, yeah, that's super true and...

I guess thinking kind of through the fact that the NFL had personnel departments and then Saban helped, you know, invigorate that on the college level. And now we're kind of seeing, you know, the front offices in the NFL, maybe that's coming down to the college level. Like I know a big part of your job is working a lot with the NFL front offices and by front offices, just mean very generally the folks that can help with the off the field aspects, especially around like the data, scouting, analytics, et cetera. Like other than like the data, of course, like maybe what are some like unique cutting edge things that NFL front offices specifically do with PFF?

that maybe you can predict that potentially that makes its way down to the college football landscape someday.

Tyler Phillips (12:10.03)
Yeah, I think it does boil back down to that data though, especially at the NFL level. I mentioned college teams are guarded, NFL teams even to a further extent. So it's really just becomes that data and being able to ingest it in a raw format and utilizing our data as, know, maybe not the sole source of the truth always, but an input into some of their more homegrown models and platforms. And to answer your second question of, I see that coming down to college football? Like, absolutely, 100%. I think in a lot of ways that

has already started for the most part. There's definitely still a difference between the NFL and the NCAA staffs and capabilities more geared towards that like raw data ingestion aspect. But I'd say that Delta is certainly shrinking. It's not growing. That's largely a result of the college teams investing in expertise and personnel with into people with that background. So earlier this week, actually, I had a call with a group of five team.

And I'm not going to go into any specifics, you know, I, during that conversation, I found myself thinking like, this is a really sophisticated conversation. It felt like one that I'd be used to having with an NFL team and it, to a certain extent, it caught me off guard, but I, I really believe that that's going to be a continuation moving forward. We're going to have those more sophisticated conversations with more and more college teams. And, yeah, so I really do think.

that it's coming and it's coming quick.

Luke Bogus (13:38.766)
Yeah, the sophistication I agree with, like I've seen everyone talking about the buzz of college teams hiring general managers, but.

those general managers are also hiring their own staffs. And some of the titles that I've heard, it's like, you know, chief data scientist for football, chief strategy officer, economist, you know, hiring a consultant who's like a quant researcher, like those kinds of things. Like it's crazy, cause you know, even when you look at like the Eagles, for example, obviously just one Super Bowl, like they have a quant researcher on staff. They have machine learning engineers on staff. I guess like you're talking a lot about like the raw data that teams are having access through PFS.

And then obviously teams like the Eagles have those kind of folks on staff. Like why do you think that is? Like why does every team have their own special sauce? And why does every team like to ingest the data raw and then have their, know, build out a three to five person engineering team to, you know, make their off the field magic. Like what are they doing with that data? mean, like what are some of the cool things that you see at the highest level, obviously, that teams are doing with your raw data?

Tyler Phillips (14:39.746)
Yeah, it goes back to that previous answer of just extracting as much value as they can for what's at their disposal. And again, with every team having access to this data, it really boils down to what you can do with it and what you can extract from it that others maybe aren't, or you wanna stay a couple of years ahead of where they're at. And a lot of times it is that raw data aspect, them ingesting it, using it as an input into their custom models and processes and...

just again, extracting as much value as they can from the data and the tools and the platforms that they have at their disposal.

Luke Bogus (15:15.6)
Another question I had is kind of around the notion of like a salary cap manager. Really quick, this is off the record. Let me know if this is a bad question or not, but.

The question is really around like the salary cap managers and like every single team. They obviously there's a GM, there's the entire technical staff that maybe uses the raw data to help gather insights for kind of off the field analysis. But then at some point that's a transition into great. have all these opinions about the players on our team, the players in free agency. And then that data has to translate to, we offer them a contract? Do we bring them in? What kind of insights do you have when it comes to that transition, that translation process between all that raw data turning into

insights and those insights turning into action. Obviously there's the action of like, you know, changing your scheme and doing scouting, but then there's the action of like, do we cut this player and move for this other player? Do we acquire this player from free agency? Maybe walk me through how that data translates from raw data to insights to action.

Tyler Phillips (16:11.906)
Yeah, it's a delicate process. it's ingesting that raw data, right And then being able to, front office folks and data scientists maybe don't always speak the same language as coaches do, right? So being able to translate those results and put it in a digestible format that isn't Python or some form of like data pipelining tool, being able to put that in an ingestible format for a coach or for a...

a front office personnel whenever you are making those, those tough decisions on, you know, do we cut this player? He could be a great player or, and that can still be true, but it still might be the best decision to move on depending on the position and the salary that's being discussed and all the different factors that go into it. To answer your initial question is like salary cap managers. Yeah, absolutely. Using our data and really anybody on staff, there's a use case for our data and tools and

our grades can be helped and to be utilized to help determine that player's valuation. And is that the only thing they're using? No, I'm not gonna go ahead and say that, but it certainly can be a piece of the puzzle that goes into making that decision. And same with some of our more advanced statistics that we provide to teams beyond just the zero to a hundred grades. And I think too, especially with this new era in college football, NIL, and more specifically, rev share.

we're going to see that type of work and those types of roles trickle down to the college level as teams effectively are managing a salary cap just like the NFL counterparts.

Luke Bogus (17:47.002)
Totally. And I think that's a really good call out to say that, you know, the, the integration of data into the processes of evaluating players, evaluating your roster, like it's not that it's overriding the coaching grades. It's not that it's overriding the scouting. It's just like a perfect blend, like a perfect triangle of like there's coaches input, there's scouting and film input, and there's like R and D input. There's like the, all kind of come together to have like a three-parted story. And then some use cases, you're going to lean on the data. Other use cases, you might lean on the eyeball test, but, you know, ignore

the data and just following your eyeballs might lead you to making emotional decisions that might not track really well with the data and vice versa. Sometimes there's things that you see in the eyeball test, a grade might be really high in a certain use case, but if you're watching the film you might have a different opinion. And so it's kind of the blend of all three that kind of makes the magic for sure.

Tyler Phillips (18:34.478)
Right. Yeah. And especially analytics and sometimes get like a black eye where it's like, the analytics say this, the analytics say that at the end of the daily analytics are just a culmination of data that you, whether you like it or not, you're doing that every single day as a human being and compiling data to make decisions. And that's really all analytics is, but yes, it, ultimately becomes, you know, front office personnel might want to look at one thing coaches are always going to watch and evaluate and confirm everything with on film.

So yeah, just getting all those different parties to come together and come on the same page, that's key.

Luke Bogus (19:09.178)
Totally.

Last major question I have is you kind of talked to the top that PFF has its tentacles and little bit of everything, whether it be the Sunday Night Football broadcast, whether it be kind of for the consumers, whether it be for, you know, again, supporting every single team, the FBS, the NFL, et cetera. I think one thing that's really interesting on like the technical side of things. And so obviously, you know, I'm CEO of Dropback and PFF and Dropback have an awesome partnership that we had announced later last year where Dropback users can utilize the power of PFF, PFF Ultimate and their grades.

within Dropback back to create their own value formulas. What's really interesting is that a lot of technology that is powering these teams and that kind of R & D aspect of these front offices, whether or not it is PFF specifically, a lot of times it is like indirectly PFF. It's like behind the scenes, know, they're leveraging PFF insights to make their product better, a different company. So it seems like that partnerships and you all like subtly powering a lot of sports tech is really prevalent. Curious, is that like a PFF strategy or like

Like why are partnerships so important to PFF in general?

Tyler Phillips (20:14.734)
Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think first off, it's crazy to think that it's already been a few months since we announced that partnership. Time is just flying already this year. But I'm certainly excited about our partnership to answer more generally as to why partnerships as a whole are a priority for us at PFF. think, simply put, it helps increase the utility of our data. So at PFF, we do a lot, like you said. We have plans to do a lot more. We have plans to continue innovating. We have plans to keep...

Luke Bogus (20:21.776)
Yeah.

Tyler Phillips (20:44.278)
like pushing this industry forward. And our mantra really is that we want to power every winning decision. It's really difficult to accomplish that on your own. So there's so many companies doing a lot of really, really interesting work that are solving a lot of really complex problems that maybe we at PFF just aren't positioned to solve at the moment. So that's why us going out and strategically partnering with other trusted vendors.

If our data can play a role in helping to solve those problems and play a role in helping to provide those solutions to teams, that's a huge win for us.

Luke Bogus (21:19.202)
Awesome. Tyler, thanks for spending 20 minutes of your time, man. I things are busy, Combine's next week, but it means a lot that you're here to talk ball and I can't wait to do this again soon.

Tyler Phillips (21:28.088)
Yeah, thanks Luke. Appreciate it. Have fun.

Luke Bogus (21:30.478)
Yeah, thanks.

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