BUFFALO, N.Y. — Analytics aren’t new to the Buffalo Bills, but three front-office moves the team announced Tuesday reflect its largest commitment to them to date.
The expansion, as General Manager Brandon Beane explained to reporters earlier in the week, is part of a plan put in place when he joined the Bills in 2017.
“We wanted to kind of build it and grow it and it could continue to grow,” Beane said of the promotion of Dennis Lock to senior director of football research, and the hirings of Drew DiSanto as a sports performance data analyst and Malcolm Charles as a data analyst.
There are fundamental reasons for incorporating metrics and algorithms into all aspects of an NFL franchise. They help in talent evaluation, the regulating of players’ physical exertion in practice to reduce injuries, negotiating player contracts, structuring of game plans and making in-game decisions.
It's that last part that makes the moves in the front office particularly noteworthy, considering the immense second-guessing that has lingered since those fateful final 13 seconds of regulation in the divisional-round playoff loss at Kansas City last January.
Without question, coaching decisions went a long way toward allowing certain victory to evaporate into defeat in overtime. Sean McDermott and his staff have spent nearly five months second-guessing themselves as heavily as they’ve been second-guessed by any number of outsiders. It’s fair to say Beane and the rest of the Bills’ organization have also given plenty of thought to finding ways to improve game management.
Including more statistical data to that process certainly can’t hurt.
“We use it more as checks and balances,” Beane said. “Whether it’s game-planning stuff – you know, the coaches are still going to follow their eyes – but we use it for, from that standpoint, with our opponents.”
Though the hiring of DiSanto goes directly to the effort to minimize soft-tissue injuries that stem from, as Beane put it, “overuse, wear and tear, too much highspeed running and all that volume,” the roles of Lock and Charles allow for the Bills to put greater focus on analytical input in scouting and game strategies. It also would figure to put the club more in line with the substantial use of analytics that Terry and Kim Pegula have long embraced for their other major sports property, the Buffalo Sabres.
In his early days with the Bills, Beane wasn’t a big believer in analytics in scouting, trusting scouts to grade players based more on what they saw rather than what the numbers told them. That thinking has gradually shifted with analytics becoming a bigger part of the Bills’ player evaluation.
Now, it seems clear the Bills want that expansion to factor into putting players in the best position for success.
“There’s a lot of information out there and you have to know what’s valuable and what’s not,” Beane said. “There are a lot of things that you don’t use, but ultimately you try and figure out what are the indicators of all this data you’re getting, whether it’s player evaluation, GPS data, whatever it is. … We put a lot into it here and I think we’ve got a good staff of people that really do a nice job with it.”
