![]() A slightly higher percentage of undergraduate programs offer an analytics class, the survey found. offer even one class in sports analytics, with only 7% requiring one to graduate, according to surveys conducted by the Sports Innovation Institute at IUPUI (see chart, ). Only 12% of the more than 200 sports management master’s and sports-focused MBA programs in the U.S. Professors, career counselors and guest speakers at the leading sports management programs across the country all routinely tell students that’s where an open job is most likely to reside at a team, and increasingly with service providers, agencies and sports sponsors.īut the supply of qualified students graduating from those programs with the necessary skills to land those jobs remains relatively thin. ![]() That’s the world they live in, so if you want to do it you have to be able to take on those odds.”Ĭareer opportunities in analytics are no secret to those pursuing jobs in sports. And this was a 21-year-old senior in college. “We had one student that lost out in the final rounds of two NFL jobs, both to Ph.D.s. “I tell the freshmen, ‘You’re going to be going up against Ph.D.s for some of these jobs,’” said Paul, who has served as director of the sports analytics program at Syracuse since its launch in 2016. And they would take a foreign language, chosen based on what might be most useful in the sport in which they hoped to work.Īll of it would lead to a two-semester senior thesis on a subject of choice, producing a “calling card” project that they could use to demonstrate their skills to employers. They would take many of the classes necessary for a sports management major, plus two sports analytics classes that are in addition to the computer skills classes. They would take core business courses, including finance, accounting and 12 hours of economics, including game theory. They would learn programming languages like R, Python and SQL for data analysis and Tableau for data visualization - baseline skills required to work in most business intelligence units - all through classes designed specifically for use in sports. They would have high-level math - 15 credit hours of it, enough to double major in math if they so choose. That’s the world they live in, so if you want to do it you have to be able to take on those odds.” - Rodney Paul, director of sports analytics, Syracuse University syracuse university He approached it in the framework of a baseball scout, focusing on five tools that would make for qualified job prospects. Taking a second look, Paul considered the likelihood that the same growth of data-driven decision-making that had swept the sports side of many organizations would lead to new departments and jobs on the business side, as teams incorporated more sophisticated predictive modeling there.Ĭomfortable that there would be demand, he set to work on a recipe to provide a supply - a curriculum that would allow someone with a specialized bachelor’s degree to compete for jobs that also might attract MBAs and Ph.D.s. Bolstered by a $15 million donation from alumnus David Falk, the school’s sports management program had an increased appetite for expansion. He didn’t think there were enough jobs to support a specialized degree program.īut the attention that came from an ESPN The Magazine story that featured his sabermetrics club’s work kept his bosses coming back to him. Paul knew the competition for those team operations jobs was fierce, attracting data scientists from elite programs, headlined by MIT. When Syracuse University leaders first approached sports economics professor Rodney Paul about growing a baseball analytics club he started on campus a dozen years ago into a degree program, he declined.Īnalytics had become a buzzy topic around sports, with basketball, football and hockey teams beginning to follow a trend that had created dozens of jobs at Major League Baseball clubs. ![]() Getty Images / Illustration by Liz Spangler
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