As two of the principals at an analytics company, Mark Branstad and Brian Spilbeler can laugh now about how little empirical data they used in their initial pitches. Back in 2003, Branstad and Spilbeler never dreamed they’d be getting hired by college football programs and NFL teams to help those organizations streamline their scouting operations. They were Indiana high school teachers who also coached football and track, and they really wanted to get the football players to come out for track. They believed specializing in one sport stunted an athlete’s growth, and the number of multi-sport high school athletes who got selected in the NFL Draft each year gave them plenty of ammo. They would tell every player they coached to wrestle, play basketball, play baseball, run track, throw the shot put — anything but just focus on football.
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Branstad, who coached jumps, might put a flier in a Franklin Central High receiver’s locker showing Randy Moss’ high school track times and distances and his NFL receiving stats. A linebacker or defensive lineman might get one from Spilbeler — who coached throws — featuring a photo of Mike Singletary with this message: “Do you want to be like Mike Singletary? Because he threw the shot put in high school.”
“Anecdotally, the numbers spoke to some kids. The experts would say ‘You’re really cherry-picking here,'” Branstad said with a laugh. “And we were. But it was really just trying to market track to football players.”
As Branstad and Spilbeler dove deeper into the numbers, though, they realized track data had some unique qualities that made it incredibly useful in the evaluation of football players who also had participated in track. Unlike football stats — or any team-sport stats, really — track stats are standardized. The level of competition doesn’t have to be accounted for when parsing the data as it does in football, basketball or baseball. Athletes compete against one another on the track or in field events, but they’re measured by a clock or a ruler. The technological advances in timing have made meet data for races extremely reliable. And during the early 2000s, all of that data began getting loaded onto the Internet. The only other sport with that level of empirical, unbiased data was swimming, but there was little crossover between football and swimming. There is a massive amount of crossover between football and track, especially among football players good enough to play in Division I.
Branstad combined that track data with football recruiting data to create Tracking Football. Spilbeler left coaching and teaching in 2014 to come aboard full time. A little more than five years ago, Tracking Football began selling a tool to college programs to help narrow down their high school recruit targets by helping identify which players might be the best pure athletes using their track data and recruiting combine data. That service now has 65 schools as clients. But a little more than a year ago, Tracking Football’s calls with college personnel directors began taking on a similar tone. “On every call they were having, they had their clients bitching about the transfer portal,” said Drew Borland, the CEO of SportSource Analytics. “Can you tell us who is in the portal? Their world started changing from high school to high school plus college.”
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The Tracking Football team was already working with Borland’s team at SportSource to combine their data for several different uses. Tracking Football had all the athleticism numbers, while SportSource had detailed statistical data for every FBS game — down to formations and player usage. The companies decided to explore a new idea as college personnel people practically begged for a new product. The result? A cheat sheet for the transfer portal. By the time the companies had a product up and running early last year, dozens of FBS schools had already subscribed. “At that point, it was like selling heaters to Eskimos,” Borland said. As of this week, 75 schools had subscribed.
The most difficult part of recruiting the portal is sifting through the players to figure out which ones might be a fit. The second-most difficult part is moving on those players because by the time your recruiting staffers have tracked down the relevant information about a player and located relevant video to provide to the coaching staff, a good player might already have chosen a new school. But a coaching staff can’t even worry about the second part until it sifts through the first part. The Tracking Football-SportSource tool turns that process from something that might take days into something that takes minutes.
Late last month, Branstad and Spilbeler were on a Zoom call with a recruiting staffer from a Power 5 school that is considering signing up for Tracking Football’s recruiting service and its transfer portal tool. Spilbeler clicked on UCLA linebacker Mitchell Agude’s name. A school staffer looking at the actual NCAA transfer portal would see only Agude’s name, year, current school and an e-mail address to contact. Calling up his UCLA bio would reveal his height and weight (6-foot-4, 245 pounds), position and biographical data that includes where he went to high school and junior college.
For a school in the Pac-12, this is probably plenty of information. All of those schools probably made a file on Agude coming out of Santiago High in Corona, Calif., or Riverside (Calif.) Community College. Their staffs probably saw Agude play either while preparing to face UCLA or while watching an opponent face UCLA. But for schools in a different part of the country — such as the one getting the Tracking Football pitch in that Zoom call — that probably isn’t enough to discern whether Agude is a player that school should recruit. For example, the position designation is misleading. Agude was a linebacker in UCLA’s system, but according to the usage data from SportSource, he started most plays at the line of scrimmage with his hand on the ground. A program that runs a 4-3 base defense that needs a defensive end might skip right over him without that key piece of information. Based on how UCLA used him, Agude absolutely would be worth a look.
The next question for a coach in the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten or SEC likely would be how well Agude’s athleticism translated to players that coach might have scouted or coached. That’s where the Tracking Football data enters the chat. Tracking Football has developed a metric called Player Athletic Index that uses track times and distances to calculate a number from one (least athletic) to five (most athletic). Agude’s PAI coming out of high school was 3.8, which would place him ahead of 84 percent of Division I football players, 75 percent of Pac-12 players and 56 percent of players selected in the NFL Draft. (A staffer at an ACC school, for example, also could select from a dropdown menu and see how Agude compares to players in that league.) But even if a coach or recruiting staffer doesn’t completely trust a metric developed using thousands of players and track stats, a look at the raw numbers should be understandable to anyone whose business is recruiting athletes.
Mitchell Agude’s high school track and field data from his page on the Tracking Football/SportsSource portal tool.
Agude’s speed numbers don’t jump off the page compared to other linebackers, but his explosiveness numbers do. His 21-foot, 9-inch long jump from a high school meet in 2017 places him seventh out of 66 Pac-12 linebackers and 13th out of 62 drafted linebackers. His 44-foot, 8-inch triple jump from a different meet in 2017 places him sixth out of 33 Pac-12 linebackers with triple jump numbers and sixth out of 32 drafted linebackers.
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None of this guarantees Agude can be a star at his next school. But it does mean that when he hit the transfer portal, nearly every Power 5 school should have contacted him to start a conversation. A lot did, too. Last week, Agude announced he’ll be choosing from a group that includes Miami, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington.
— Mitchell Agude (@OfficialAgude) February 23, 2022
When Spilbeler and Branstad began trying to pitch Tracking Football to coaches in 2015, they met initial resistance because coaches would remember the players who had great track numbers who didn’t pan out as football players. And that does happen — just as a player given a five-star ranking by a recruiting service might not pan out relative to his recruiting hype. But as Tracking Football has been able to add more data and refine its PAI formula, the athleticism numbers are tracking similarly to recruiting rankings. They may be wrong individually on occasion, but in the aggregate, over time, they are accurate identifiers of talent.
It would seem the services — annual fees range from a few thousand to the mid-five-figures — would be most helpful at programs that don’t employ an army of recruiting staffers. They would allow for a quicker narrowing of the pool, and they also would allow schools that can’t afford to recruit the entire country to identify players from areas they don’t traditionally recruit who might fit in the program. Of course, this also works for bigger schools looking to spot-recruit an intriguing player.
Hassan Haskins was a three-star tailback from the St. Louis area in the class of 2018 who entered his senior season at Eureka Senior High in 2017 with offers from schools such as Memphis, Eastern Michigan, Illinois State and Indiana State. Michigan, an early Tracking Football client, had a chance to look at how Haskins stacked up against players already in the Big Ten. Today, Haskins’ best high school high jump (6 feet, 7 inches) would place him No. 1 out of 34 Big Ten backs with high jump numbers. His high jump and long jump numbers also compared favorably with Big Ten and drafted backs. Last season, Haskins carried 270 times for 1,327 yards and was a first-team All-Big Ten selection.
That narrowing process works just as well for players leaving their school. When linebacker Jabril Cox decided to leave North Dakota State following the 2019 season to try to play a season in the Power 5 before heading to the NFL, any staffer who pulled up Cox’s Tracking Football profile and compared it with his prolific production at North Dakota State would immediately ask two questions:
• How did this guy not get any Power 5 offers out of high school?
• How quickly can we get him here for an official visit?
Cox, who wound up playing in 2020 at LSU before being selected in the fourth round by the Dallas Cowboys, had speed numbers in high school that placed him among the upper tier of Power 5 players. His splits in 400-, 800- and 1,600-meter relays ranked ahead of more than 86 percent of SEC linebackers and more than 79 percent of drafted linebackers. There was a robust market for Cox’s services when he left North Dakota State because he was one of the best players on a team that had won three consecutive FCS national titles, but the next version of Cox could play just about anywhere and teams that use the Tracking Football-SportSource portal tool would find him and deluge him with pitches to come to their schools.
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One of Branstad’s favorite examples is Bobby Price, a 6-3 corner who played at Norfolk State and spent last season on the Detroit Lions’ roster. Price was a great hitter in college along with being long, rangy and fast. He was a high school quarterback from Virginia Beach, Va., recruited as an athlete, and had colleges been more in tune with what the track numbers mean, the explosiveness indicated by Price’s 6-foot, 8-inch high jump and 23-foot, 4-inch long jump in high school should have piqued the interest of ACC, Big Ten and SEC schools. Had Price been younger and decided to jump into the portal to try to move up to the FBS, he likely would have gotten plenty of interest.
Borland said SportSource is in the process of beefing up its FCS and Division II data to bring it closer to what the company offers for the FBS. That should allow schools to cast an even wider net into the portal and come back with players recruiting staffers can present to coaches to further evaluate.
Meanwhile, Tracking Football and SportSource also are marketing a similar tool to NFL teams to help those organizations evaluate draft prospects. They’re pitching the services as a more efficient way for teams to identify a potential starter who can be had in the late rounds or to create a pool of undrafted free agents who might stick on the roster.
“Our longer vision is we’re both starting to do more NFL work,” Borland said. “When you can see on-field college production plus athleticism and you combine it get that view, to an NFL scout it’s really impressive. We’ve got some really cool stuff in the hopper to combine athleticism and production data to project where a guy is going to be in the NFL Draft. We’re doing all this machine learning, and that’s what’s been the long pole in the tent.”
Branstad and Spilbeler, meanwhile, will keep preaching the gospel of long jump and shot put distances to any football coaches — at any level — willing to listen. “It’s really fun when you see that (football) field expression of the track data,” Spilbeler said. “This is the good stuff. It’s just a different type of athleticism.”
Branstad and Spilbeler want every college and NFL team to subscribe to their services, but they also have an ulterior motive. Deep down, they’re still the multi-sport high school coaches who believe multi-sport athletes have a better chance to succeed. And they hope that by bringing track data to the highest levels of football, they can convince more young football players to shun specialization and just go compete in the offseason.
(Top photo of Michigan’s Hassan Haskins jumping into the end zone against Ohio State: Mike Mulholland / Getty Images)
