Sabremetricians Unite: Management School Adds Program in Sports Data Analytics
Numbers pervade athletics, from the major professional leagues to amateur levels to public betting, and now NJIT is getting into the game with an academic concentration in business and sports data analytics beginning in fall 2024.
The concentration will be offered through Martin Tuchman School of Management, where undergraduates will learn the data science behind the multibillion-dollar industry, which is as big in metropolitan New York as anywhere in the world. North Jersey alone is home to five professional teams, horse racing at the Meadowlands and four Division I college programs, including all 17 teams fielded by NJIT Highlanders.
Analytics courses are already taught in the existing MTSM concentrations for accounting systems, finance, innovation/entrepreneurship, management information systems and marketing. “We wanted to create a business and sports analytics option, pulling in the analytics courses, as well as creating two new courses,” MTSM Dean Oya Tukel explained.
In addition, “We wanted to make these analytics courses a little bit more AI-enabled, because that's the way it goes. Artificial intelligence is a smart tool that helps you with analytics. Now your job is going to be more of, not doing number crunching and using Excel, but more of the interpretation and insights into the data for decision- making. It becomes much more important today for a business student than actually running the numbers and the spreadsheets because AI will be able to do that for us. I mean, it's there already,” Tukel observed.
There’s precedent for NJIT students enamored with sports data. Ivana Seric ‘17 worked in data science for the National Basketball Association’s Philadelphia 76ers. Three students placed second nationally in an NBA data science contest in 2018. A pair of graduate students started a data science club with an eye on sports in 2022. Informally, NJIT Highlander sports teams are already dipping their toes in the data analytics waters and working with student interns when they are available, Athletics Director Lenny Kaplan said.
It’s the same technology Alabama football has ... All you need is that one point of information that the coaches buy into, to make a switch in your strategy, that wins a game.
All of this helped inspire Tukel to create the new concentration. She’s a Cleveland Cavaliers fan, having spent 27 years at Cleveland State University — spanning both of Lebron James’ stints as a Cavs superstar — before joining NJIT in 2019. She also helped the Cleveland Guardians baseball team, working as a consultant on their supply chain. As an avid hiker, she also uses popular data-centric mobile apps like AllTrails and Strava.
Kaplan, who became athletics director in 2000, said he is excited about the edge that a formal data analytics effort can bring to Highlander teams. Most of the large universities have data analysts on their payroll, but NJIT doesn’t have such resources, he explained.
“We don't have the money to out-recruit or out-build other programs in many cases. And that's okay, because everybody finds their spot and that's what they do,” Kaplan said. Although there isn’t an employee dedicated to it, already, “We use analytics in certain ways, just not as in-depth. I use biomedical data that we glean from Polar heart monitors, from Whoop sleep bracelets, from what's called EliteForm technology — it's cameras on platforms, it talks about torque and speed and you know how you're working out — it’s the same technology Alabama football has. That's the bio data stuff. We use our own students to help with our strength coach, depending on the year if we could find a student, to help crunch all those numbers … I'm sure there are some things we can glean that we can share with the coaches that may help them. All you need is that one point of information that the coaches buy into, to make a switch in your strategy, that wins a game.”
“I think all of that will be great opportunities that we can come up with for class assignments, where they can observe the teams and the games, collect data and analyze it,” Tukel said. Whether it’s in-game or at any of the many businesses in the overall sports ecosystem, “Sports is a conversation opener. And definitely everybody has an interest in sports. So my students can use that as an advantage to go into data analytics in those kinds of organizations.”
