Rams Analytics Team

The Rams Fantasy (Analytics) Team

http://www.therams.com/news-and-events/article-1/The-Rams-Fantasy-Analytics-Team/6eeea7cf-b28b-4276-b8a9-705af56629bc

Sports and analytics is catching fire and the Rams have assembled a fantasy team of their own to stay ahead of the curve

The Boston Red Sox went from ‘cursed to first’ in their magical ride to becoming world champions in 2004. Despite the pageantry and excitement of one the biggest sports stories in America, sixth grader Rebecca Lally was left in awe during Boston’s preceding series against the New York Yankees when an intriguing stat-line flashed across her television screen.

“Mariano Rivera has blown more saves against the Red Sox than any other team,” she read.

That stat held true until the Yankees’ great retired in 2013 and by that time the young Lally was an industrial and system engineering major at the Georgia Institute of Technology with a passion for sports and statistics. All throughout college she interned in the school’s sports information office, working with all of the athletic teams, and then landed a stats internship with ESPN the summer before her senior year. The pace quickened when graduation rolled around and she received a timely phone call from the Rams.

“I went to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston my junior year of college,” Lally explained. “Tony Pastoors, the Rams’ senior assistant, got my resume and we kept in touch through my senior year. Then he offered me the job my last semester in college.”

The job? Football information technology analyst, a title she earned six months ago. Upon joining the team, she became the third member of a carefully and unconventionally formed analytics group that included Ryan Garlisch, the engineer, and Jake Temme, the architect.

THE ARCHITECT & THE ENGINEER

Anything data-related within the player personnel decision space touches the Rams football information technology department. Like IT in any other sense, they collect information, house it and distribute it to people so they can make better decisions.

Over the past few years, improving in technology has been an area of focus for the scouting and football operations departments. While C.O.O. Kevin Demoff, General Manager Les Snead and Pastoors contemplated creating an analytics department, Snead received a cold email from a local information technology consultant named Jake Temme. His email included draft models and outlines of other projects he had been working on for several years, as well as a pitch to join Snead’s staff.

“Tony Pastoors sent me an application the next day based on that email,” Temme said, still in disbelief that he was telling a true story. “My number one interest has always been sports and the NFL, so this made the logical bridge into it. Timing was impeccable.”

After five months of interviews, Temme landed the job. Garlisch was hired at the same time. The two shared a small room adorned with dozens of neon post-it notes and a white board wall filled with neatly scripted to-dos and ideas. Of the two, Garlisch was the only one who entered the job with NFL experience, having completed a year-long internship with the Cleveland Browns (2012-13). Despite his internship and IT background, Garlisch as well as Temme leaned heavily on Snead, the scouts, and JW Jordan – the team’s director of player evaluation, research & analysis – as they grinded through their first year.

“JW, he’s just such a huge guide for us around everything that happens through the offseason, through the season, through the combine, through the draft,” Garlisch said. “He knows what’s supposed to be done when. Everything I do, I show him first before I show anybody. He’s been a huge help.”

Likewise Snead was a constant presence during their rookie season. He often times made impromptu visits to their office and vice versa upwards of four times a day to offer counsel, suggestions, or to simply check in.

“For sure there is such a thing as too much information. That’s probably one of the most difficult parts of our jobs is trying to figure out what’s important,” Temme said. “From some data sources we get about 500 pieces of information on every play, so it’s like, ‘What do I use to figure out what’s actually pertinent and what’s just noise?’ But Les is the driver. The most important piece of our relationship is going back and forth and coming to him with stuff and saying, ‘This is the list of things we have, help me prioritize these.’”

Garlisch and Temme’s rookie season culminated with the 2015 NFL Draft where the footprints of the work were evident. After the draft and the conclusion of the offseason training program, the two had the opportunity to take a few weeks off for the summer. Instead, they opted to spend their vacation at Rams Park building a new scouting website from scratch.

“After the draft, we pretty much had two months to pound away at it all summer,” Garlisch said. “They told us during the summer we could leave, but we stayed and we did long hours and got this thing ready. It is pretty amazing that we did this in two months, but it’s still evolving. It’s being developed constantly.”

THE FANTASY LINEUP

Snead is an analytical person by nature, according to Temme and those who work closely with him. He’s always in search to answer the question of, “Why?” and Garlisch, Lally and Temme provide value by trying to answer that for him. In order to do so, they depend on one another’s specialized expertise.

“As far as our three delineation of roles, Rebecca is the stat whiz,” Temme explained. “She’s the one that definitely has the strongest math skills and she’s the most analytical out of the three of us. I do the data and collect information from different sources and kind of bridge that gap between Rebecca and myself.”

Bridging the gap typically involves the two discussing theories and trends presented in the data collected by Temme. From there, Lally makes the statistics relevant to personnel decision makers. As for Garlisch, he is the creative piece to the puzzle. His primary focus is formatting the club’s scouting website and making it very user-friendly.

“My job is making the site easy to use for our scouts, organizing things correctly, making sure when you click on something that it works and that they understand how to use the site,” Garlisch explained as he demonstrated the system’s capabilities.

The scouting website is an impressive one, even more so since it was built in two months. It’s decorated in Rams branding and features customizable searches, easy print options and other unique features designed to increase the efficiency of scouting and football operations.

Beyond the website, Garlisch, Lally and Temme have taken on several side projects that have benefitted departments outside of scouting, including coaching, athletic training, business development and public relations. What’s unique to the Rams football IT department is that they’re one of the few, if any, staffs in the NFL that work directly with the players in that they developed software to assist with their recovery, nutrition and treatment plans.

“It’s fun and I enjoy it,” Lally said in front of a computer screen filled with color coded graphs and tables. “I feel like we’ve done a lot of stuff getting through the season and then getting ready for this next draft. I think after one whole cycle we can start to dig deeper and experiment more with different ideas we want to explore.”

FINAL RAM-BLINGS

Temme’s favorite Rams moment…“Definitely the draft, just because being involved in that having watched it on TV since I was 9 years-old, it was awesome. We were attached to the draft room, so just being in the room while decisions were being made and being able to just be a part of that was definitely the coolest part so far.”

In their spare time…They play in a sand volleyball league together.

Did you know…When Garlisch was in college at Northern Illinois, he did his capstone project on the university’s football team and built a prediction machine. It would predict if a team was going to run or pass in certain situations.

What Lally is looking forward next…Working her first draft!

Garlisch graduated from Northern Illinois University with a degree in operations management and information systems. He is from Hoffman Estates, Ill. and is married to Brittany…Lally is a native of Lawrenceville, Ga. and joined the Rams immediately upon graduating from Georgia Tech in 2015…Temme came to the team after working as an IT consultant in the St. Louis area for two years. He attended the University of Dayton, earning a bachelor’s degree in management information systems and entrepreneurship (2012), and is engaged to Holly.