Pete Carroll, Raiders beefing up investment in (and reliance on) football analytics

New York Times

2 days ago

There's no denying Pete Carroll's 14-year tenure with the Seattle Seahawks was wildly successful. But like any head coach, he had his faults that drew the ire of the fan base. One of his most criticized traits was his tendency to play conservatively.
In the modern era, as analytics have become a bigger part of teams' decision-making processes, they've gotten more pass-happy and aggressive in their fourth-down decision-making. The Seahawks, however, often lagged behind. That began to change late in Carroll's time there, but Seattle's investment in analytics — and Carroll's openness to incorporating them — remained measured compared to other teams.
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Carroll was fired following the 2023 season, and he spent 2024 out of coaching. And while his status as the oldest coach in NFL history (74) might suggest he'd be set in his ways, he changed his tune on analytics after he was hired as the Las Vegas Raiders' coach earlier this offseason.
'There's patterns to the game that I (began to see) differently,' Carroll said in February. 'A lot of it was the analytic outlook of it. When you're in the midst of all of these seasons and every week, as you're just so frantically going about planning for the next game, you don't get the chance to have that perspective and slow your mind down.'
The Raiders' personnel moves this offseason have shown that wasn't just coachspeak from Carroll. They retained staffers who worked with analytics, including VP of football research and development David Christoff, director of football systems Brad Goldsberry and coordinator of player personnel research and strategy Walt King, and made several additions.
In February, the Raiders hired senior vice president of football operations Mark Thewes to help lead their analytics efforts. Thewes previously oversaw the Denver Broncos' analytics department. Since bringing on Thewes, the Raiders have hired head coach research specialist Ryan Paganetti, senior manager of football strategy Kunal Singh and manager of football data science and engineering Andrew Fedele.
The revamped ownership group, which has expanded beyond controlling owner Mark Davis to include minority owner Tom Brady and others, has invested the necessary resources to enhance the staffing and technology required to run a functional analytics department. General manager John Spytek already frequently used analytics in his previous role as assistant GM of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but this level of investment is new for Carroll.
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'He's totally receptive,' Thewes said last month when asked about Carroll's willingness to integrate analytics. 'He challenges us to come up with new ways to challenge his ways of thinking. … We're trying to organize the data in a way that is supportive to the decision-making process.'
Carroll intends to lean on those resources to blend his old-school principles with a new-school approach.
'I'm really excited to convey those things that we take a look at differently than I have before,' Carroll said. 'So, I have a really strong philosophy about how we do things and why we do what we do, but yet, if you're competing, then you have to be dynamic enough to continue to grow and expand.'
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As part of the 2011 NFL collective bargaining agreement, players agreed to allow the league to track their on-field locations and health metrics. That opened the door for the creation of Next Gen Stats, a collection of data gathered by the NFL to create advanced statistics. By 2017, every team had NGS data collection. It was around then that NFL teams began to invest more in analytics to find ways to use the data to their benefit.
For the coaching staff, analytics are typically used to formulate a plan for fourth-down decision-making, identify ideal run-pass splits and predict an opposing team's tendencies based on its past behavior. In the front office, the numbers can be used to conduct player modeling, create athletic scores, estimate the contract value of players based on age, position and other factors, predict compensatory draft picks and gauge value in prospective trades.
The Raiders' technology department is tasked with organizing the data necessary to make those decisions. From there, the analytical side of the equation is about making predictive conclusions.
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'Part of our job is to be able to consider large amounts of information from many different sources, synthesize that information, and then make it presentable to the decision-makers in personnel and coaching,' Christoff said. 'We want to simplify complex decisions, guard against inefficiencies and identify hidden advantages. The analytics piece is complementary to the hard work done by the rest of our football staff, with the goal of maximizing the time and information available to us.'
Analytics is often viewed as a complex subject, but it's the team's job to make it simple.
'Our goal is to cut through the noise,' Singh said, 'and spotlight the key details that matter most when making big decisions.'
Nowadays, most NFL teams have their own in-house data systems. The Los Angeles Rams, for example, created a system called 'JAARS' for their various staff members to access.
Thewes is in the process of helping create a similar scouting system for the Raiders. It'll be built to contain draft prospect write-ups, the team's draft board, free-agency information, background checks, game film, medical reports, basic stats, analytics and more. Naturally, that system being useful moving forward is dependent on the work of the Raiders' scouting department.
'There's a bunch of different ways that you can use numbers,' Thewes said. 'But at the end of the day, you have to have really good scouts, as well.'
For Raiders fans, the most visible representation of the team's use of analytics will be Carroll's game management. When it comes to supporting that process, Paganetti, in particular, will play a crucial role.
'He's going to be working with me directly,' Carroll said, 'as well as the offensive and defensive staffs. He's got a great background. This world of analysis is something that really continues to grow.'
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As Carroll mentioned, Paganetti has a varied background. The Dartmouth grad was a scouting intern with the Dallas Cowboys in 2013 and an assistant coach at Belmont Hill School (Mass.) from 2012-2014. In 2015, he was hired as an analyst by then-Philadelphia Eagles head coach and current Raiders offensive coordinator Chip Kelly.
Kelly was fired by the Eagles in 2015, but Paganetti stayed in Philadelphia through the 2020 season and ended his tenure there with the title of assistant linebackers coach/game management. He was hired by the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2022 and spent this past season as their director of football analytics. The combined experience of working as a scout, coach and analytics staffer appealed to Carroll.
'Ryan understands everything,' Carroll said. 'He's been in it long enough that he brings a connection to the past, which I really like, and he can make sense of what we used to look at and how we look at things now.'
Paganetti will focus on game management and help work analytics into the overall coaching staff's planning processes.
'Ryan has a tremendous, rich history of learning how to deal with the analytics part of it, but yet football as well,' Carroll said. 'He won't be familiar with the kinds of questions I'll ask him, but he'll be ready to handle the answers.'
On the personnel and scouting side, the analytics department gleaned valuable insight from how the Raiders handled free agency and the draft. They're still relatively early in the process, but the internal hope is that the added emphasis on analytics will benefit the Raiders both during the season and in the offseason.
'We're trying to get us all coming from different places, really, on the same page,' Thewes said, 'in how we can learn and observe this first year and then build on it in future years. But as we go through the entire 12-month calendar year, I think we're only going to get better in Year 2 and 3 and beyond.'