Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - BONUS EPISODE: Pro Football Focus founder Neil Hornsby tells his story and explains the grading system

Episode Date: October 22, 2023

Matthew Coller sits down with Pro Football Focus founder Neil Hornsby to talk about his story of building the company from scratch and how the grading system works. Check out "Football is a Numbers Game" here: https://www.amazon.com/Football-Numbers-Game-Data-Driven-Approach/dp/1637272189 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Collar here, and this is another special bonus episode of what I am calling the Self-Promotion Tour. And joining me to talk about his career and my book, Football is a Numbers Game, PFF, and How a Data-Driven Approach Shook Up the Sport, the founder of PFF, the main character of my story, recently retired as CEO of Pro Football Focus, Neil Hornsby. Neil, I've been teasing your appearance for a few weeks now that I would bring you on, talk about who you are, where you came

from, how you started PFF, why no one knows who you are. What is up, man? It's great to have you on the show. It's fantastic to talk to you as always, Matthew. You know, I love to talk about football and business with you. So yeah, whatever you need, dude. Yeah. And boy, we talked a lot of football and business over about a year and a half that I spent writing the book. And I think I may have spent more hours talking to you than my own wife during that time of writing the book. But I think I may have spent more hours talking to you than my own wife during that time of writing the book. But I think a good place to start is you building PFF from the ground up. And the number one thing people have said to me after reading the book is I had no idea about this guy, Neil, who started PFF and had no idea where he came from, including some people in the NFL who use PFF every single day, had no idea of the origin story. So of course we've got 75,000 words

about it in the book, but I would love for you to tell the audience how you started Pro Football football focus and why? So it's just a hobby. It's just nothing other than I felt that there was a hole in the marketplace. Well, it wasn't even the marketplace. There was a hole for me as a fan that wasn't being filled. I would open books. I would try and get whatever books I could. And they would say things like, this is back in the 80s, 90s. They would say things like, this particular guard who plays for the probably LA Raiders at that time is the best pole blocker in the league. And I'm thinking, where have you got that data from? And I'm very skeptical of it because I'm thinking in order to say that, you need to have looked at every single other guard. You need to look at every single pull block.

And then you need to have given them some sort of positive or negative grade on every single pull block in order to do that. So are you just reaching deep into your bodily cavities and pulling this out? Or have you got some other methodology? And I think the thing that I always have believed in is don't criticize just randomly if you haven't got a solution. I don't know whether it was the way that I am or the way I was brought up or what my parents told me, but if you go in and you just say, that's rubbish, then are you just exacerbating the story of what one, you know, he said, she said.

So I guess the next point was to go, well, in order to prove it's either rubbish or not rubbish, we have to collect the data. You know, I would have to collect the data, which then starts this whole process of, well, okay, you're in for a penny, in for a pound, and you for a penny in for a pound and you start and you start collecting data and you start looking at data and it's becomes an addiction it becomes an addiction for the data because when we started collecting this data I was absolutely drawn to what we would get out of it, what we were coming out.

And I knew that what we were pulling out that probably only the NFL clubs had. So we had something that only the NFL clubs had outside. That was it. And they weren't going to share it with anybody. As it transpired, they didn't have it either. So we were the only person in the world with this particular data. And I guess the only thing I wasn't interested in it to put it out to the world. I wasn't interested in it to make money out of,

and I don't think any of us were, I wasn't interested in it necessarily to talk about i was just interested in it for its own sake for the for the collecting of something sick and i think if you go back and look at the people who were involved in those early days whether it be ben stockwell or carl edelstein or rickmond, you know, those type of guys, the guys who were still with PFF who were there in the early days, they were interested. They weren't interested in getting the data and then making a big name

for themselves out of it. They were as interested in the data for the data's sake as I was. And I think that's probably why people haven't heard of me or Rick or Khaled or Ian Perks or, you know, Brian Hall or Mike Parker, because none of those guys were interested in putting themselves on a YouTube video and getting less than a thousand views. You know, that wasn't what they did. You know, they were they were interested in creating data. And then when we knew what we had and the teams didn't have it, they were interested in how can we make this better?

How can we work with the teams how can we give them a product that they don't have the money was always secondary you know whether we made money out of it or not that wasn't the reason to be the reason to be was to get this data and then when we found out that NFL teams didn't have the data then then it was just, oh, how can we make this data better? How can we do things to make it more accurate to what are we missing? So it was more like an intellectual pursuit, really. The pursuit of favoring inverted commas was never on the agenda. Now, there's Sam Monson and Steve Palazzolo who have done a really good job of articulating that data out to the fans who were interested in that type of thing.

And I think they're really good at what they do. They're excellent. But that was not the reason for most of us. It was, you know, it may have been the reason for them, but they have a different type of mentality. We're all different. But those guys are really good at what they do. And they did a fantastic job for PFF of trying to explain the data to people.

But the majority of people in PFF, I think, did it for love of the game. Right. And I think we probably need to even go back a little bit to explain how you became a football fan, because I'm sure people have noticed by now, though you just became an American citizen. Congratulations on that. But how you became a football fan to begin with, which sparked your interest to try to collect data i mean that was what surprised me when we first met in 2018 when i came down to do a week's worth of shows to preview the season and i was like wait this guy started the company like what uh and then for a little while you were like a mysterious

figure to the world it's like all these random English guys are like looking at, what was it like with football when you started watching it, which must've been in the eighties over there? Like, were there, were there a lot of fans at that time or were you just kind of the weird guy who liked American football or what? So 1983, I started watching it regularly. I would say I'd seen a few games before then a few Super Bowls would be, highlights of Super Bowls would be broadcast on a thing that was called Worldwide Sports, but it would be, you know, from the late 70s. Probably the Steelers, Rams, Super Bowl, things of that sort. But 1983, they started a program on a new channel. They needed new content.

And they started a weekly show where they would show one game and then highlights from all, small highlights from all the games, 30 seconds. And it was exciting. It was different. It was everything that we know and love about football and that you don't get i you know if you speak to people in the uk they'll say oh i don't like football it's got that stop start thing you never get any flow to it and i get it you know if you're used to soccer or if

you're used to rugby or things of that sort of ilk then then there is that element to it. But I used to like that, the fact that you could then analyse an individual play. You know, you could look at that in detail and think more about it. So it always fascinated me. And then 1983, I'm at college. I went to college in Liverpool Liverpool John Moores University I did physics and I'm on my way back home

to Cumbria from college and I'm at Lime Street Station and I know it's a magazine Touchdown magazine and I pick it up, I buy it and I'm reading it on the train on the way home. And it's fascinating to me, all these box scores with all these statistics,

all these things that I came to hate and not particular. Back in the day, back in 1983, it was everything I could ever wanted. I just wanted more box scores. And these were just you know running stats rushing stats would be number you know name of the name of the player number of carries uh number of touchdowns number of yards and that'll be it there'll be nothing you know uh and then over the course of time you get to realize that these things really you, aren't what they're cracked up to be. And you need a lot more data to be able to understand them as time goes on. But back in the day, those box scores just fascinated me.

And I loved it. And it's like anything. It's like any obsession. The more you learn about something, the more you understand it. It becomes cyclical. So therefore, the more you understand it, the more you understand the nuances. And it just grows and grows and grows and becomes that huge momentum, that huge flywheel that builds. And that was what it did for me.

So, yeah, that's going interesting to me that you became so obsessed with the sport because it's not like you had this culture of hanging out with the guys and they're all watching football the way that we would do here because everybody would have been soccer fans and cricket fans and everything else. So you were kind of doing this on your own, which ultimately leads to how PFF gets started because you went in search of other people who actually like this to connect with and talk about the game. And it's very commonplace now for people, even like myself, to start internet companies, but yours got started essentially through message boards. And you have to be on the older side to understand that message boards were our social media back then, if you wanted to connect with other people and talk with other people. And some people would write 7,000 word essays on message boards and fight with each other and stuff like that. So I guess it's not that new what social media is like now,

but that is how you ended up finding some of the people who became lifelong employees at pff which is always so crazy to me yeah i know very much back in the day ben was on the message board khaled was on the message board sam was on the message board you know he wasn't on the message because he's he still doesn't know very much about football, but he's still one of the best IT professionals you'll ever meet and certainly one of the best friends I'll ever have. But yeah, it was message boards. That's exactly what you described it better than I ever could. And that was how we met. And we got together and then came up with crazy ideas and put things backwards and forwards. And then the big change really was when a company called Pontell offered a service where they would send you a DVD of any game that you wanted, the full game, the full unedited game. And you would choose your game on the Monday

and they would normally have it to you in the post Wednesday or Thursday. And then that gave us the facility to then watch more and more games more and more teams rather than just the games that the game normally that was provided for you by the tv station and it gave us the facility to start analyzing more games um And I remember getting a Pontell DVD and starting it, going through it, and starting building a database. I can't remember who it was against, but it was San Diego against somebody. And it just started from there, just started building the database. What would you do?

How would you grade this? What's important? What isn't important? What's collected? What's not collected? And we had a big thing back in the day. The only data that we would collect were things that were completely unavailable that nobody else did. If somebody else was doing it, why collect sacks when somebody

else has already collected sacks? Why collect yards when somebody else has already collected yards? Why collect weather when somebody else? But pressures, nobody was collecting pressures back in the day. Mistackles, nobody was collecting mistackles back in the day. So all of those things that we would collect additionally. And then, obviously, the real nuance came when we started grading offensive linemen and grading players and going, what to expect? And I remember that there were some companies who were coming up with stats for sacks given up. That was probably in the early 2000s.

It was starting that some people were given sacks given up. That was probably in the early 2000s. It was starting that some people were given sacks given up. And you would look at these sacks given up and all they were doing was they were going, they were taking the defensive player who made the sack and they were going back and they were tracking him back to the start of the play. And whichever offensive lineman was on them, that offensive lineman was given up the sack there was no thought to whether the quarterback had had too deep a drop whether the quarterback had you know slid to the wrong place in the pocket and it was the quarterback's fault or anything like that it was just whoever was on that defensive player, they gave up a sack. And I was thinking, this is rubbish. You know, how can you be so blind and so unthoughtful

that that's the way that you're going to provide a stat? You know, and we got into a lot of detail and we worked with eventually a lot of offensive line coaches to put some real nuance onto. Pressure's given up what a definition of a hit is, a beaten defender, all of those types of things that we would then collect. But get to the stage where we knew what we were doing and we could do it with a huge degree of accuracy. Folks, if you know me, then you understand how much I love going to sporting events. When I go to another city, what's the first thing I look for? Who else is playing when

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that were unexpected. But the grades in particular are always talked about. And I think that it's almost like you need a PDF to someone to download when they start looking at the grades. Like, here's where they come from. Here's how they're formed. Here's how they're done. So they don't have to be explained 100 times. so it's so funny to me when I see criticism of the grades and you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg to what has formed them. saying, all right, this is what I think. And then Sam Monson and Ben Stockwell start working together to form an outline of how everything is done and then build on it just by watching the tape. But what's so interesting to me is that the NFL forms these grades as they go along. And I think that's the biggest thing that people don't know is that you would talk to teams, you would talk to offensive line coaches like

Paul Alexander, who I interviewed for the book, who is an absolute legend and considered one of the best to have ever done it. And Bobby Sloak, who is now the offensive coordinator of the Houston Texans and Zach Robinson, who's the quarterback coach. Like these are people who helped form and sharpen these grades to what we have now, which doesn't mean they're perfect, but it does mean it's about as close to how the NFL wants it to be done as it can be. Yeah, the grades were an interesting thing because to me, it interestingly came from rugby. So the whole concept came from rugby. So Will Greenwood wrote a book that after the 2003 World Cup when England won the World Cup and I was a huge England rugby fan and it basically what he said was the only thing the only rating that he considered valid about himself was something

his father did because he would say he would come back after a game and because he'd scored two tries everybody would be saying what a great game he'd had and then he would have some games where he didn't score any tries but he would make three tackles he would do some excellent work he'd make a turnover in the rook all the stuff that people aren't talking about and nobody would say anything about what how well he'd done he said so what his father used to do is his father used to look at every intervention that he'd had in the game he just used to watch him and he used to grade him positively or negatively on each intervention and that seemed like a great methodology to me and paul Zimmerman, Dr. Z, whose book I read multiple times and is a fantastic read, just a fantastic guy, did a similar thing. The only difference that we had was I just felt that some positive or negative intervention was not a good enough thing because you could have a small positive intervention than something that's significantly better so is it good to get a sack after three and a half seconds and you

chase a guy and you eventually get to him and you know manage to bring him down for a two yard loss or is that really a coverage sack or is it much or significantly better to beat Joe Thomas in like 1.7 seconds and just take the quarterback to the ground and cause a fumble? So those are both equivalent players. No, they're not. So you need to have some way to differentiate even on individual players, certain players as better than others. So that became a pattern and we went and we tried all of this.

And the only thing that mattered to all of us was getting better. Didn't matter where we started or with whatever. We always worked on the principle that the only thing that mattered was making these things more accurate. So it was never a question of, are these good or bad? They were just different. They were things that nobody had ever done before, but we wanted them to be the best evaluation mechanism that we could come up with. And the best way to do that was to start working with people who would help us make them better. And the three people that you mentioned all did that. Bobby did a wonderful job on our coverage grades and trying to get our coverage metrics better. Zach did a fantastic job of putting deeper quarterback metrics into what we did.

And Paul helped us tremendously with our offensive line grades. So we would always try and – it was never a question of, these are really good and go out and sell them as being fantastic or anything like that. It was just a question of how can we make them better? What can we do to make them better? And I knew that we'd done a really good job. Paul knows that I get up early in the morning. He's an early riser as well. So I remember one morning, it was probably back, I can't remember, 2019, something like that. I got a call. It was five o'clock in the morning, 5 a.m.

Who would phone you at 5 a.m. in the morning? And I looked. It was Paul Alexander. And he said, Neil, he said, I've got to tell you this. He said, I've been dying to tell you this. He said, you know, the guys haven't, we haven't performed particularly well as an offensive line this year. He said, so I had to go back and I had to try and figure out what the problem was.

And he said, I took all 600 negatively graded players that you guys had given the offensive line so far. And he said, how many do you think I disagreed with? I said, I don't know. i said whatever he said no he said 12 players 12 players out of 600 he said i'm their coach he said i only disagreed with 12 players 2%. And I knew at that stage that we were doing a good job. But I also, because I'm just this way, I was thinking, 12 players. Why did we get those 12 players? You know, what did we do wrong?

So Paul, can you tell us? But no, what he then did was he took those 600 players because what he was doing was he was then going and bucketing them into was this a mental error? Did the guy get beaten physically? Did the guy get beaten for lack of technique? Was it physical? Was he simply not strong enough?

So he was then going along and then using these things to provide a plan for his team to get better. So look, people can criticize the grades as much as they want. But I think most people criticize the grades because they don't actually understand how we do them, the depths that we go to to get there, or what we believe are their strengths and weaknesses. Every single person, I always offer this to any coach or anybody who wanted to, anybody, please come down to the office or we'll set up a Zoom call or we'll do whatever. Let us explain the grading system to you. Let us explain what we do. And if you're still uncomfortable after all of that, fine. Or help us to make them better. Do you know, we want to listen. We want to get better.

Explain to us why they're wrong. And I can honestly say of all the people who took us up on that, there were a number, not one left the building thinking that what we were doing was bad or a waste of space or anything. The worst they thought was, yeah, there are some weaknesses in it, but they can be cleaned up if you do this this and this and i another good example of this and another good example of how the depths to which we would go to came back on me because remember that thing i was telling you about this pole block and how this guy was saying he was the best pole blocker so

we had a um we would go to indapolis to the Combine. And the Combine was almost irrelevant. It was just an opportunity to meet teams, our customers at the time. And we had a lot of team customers. And we would run an event at St. Elmo's, downstairs in St. Elmo's, where everybody would be invited and have a few drinks and talk about things. Anyway, a couple of guys from the panthers were there um rob rogers and mark comms at the time and they came to me

and they said we're just talking over a drink and we were saying we yeah we we believe we've got a problem with your grades neil i said okay what's that and they said well we believe you've got a problem with your grades Neil I said okay what's that and they said well we believe you've got Tri Turner and Andrew Norwell mixed up so at the time the Panthers had Andrew Norwell playing left guard and Tri Turner playing right guard and you you've got both of them graded as good players but you've got Andrew Norwell graded higher, slightly higher than Tri Turner. And I said, okay. I said, so show me on the grades. If I give you all the grades, show me which ones are wrong. And they said, look, you're not putting any differentiation on the type of block. You know, some reach blocks are more difficult than other reach blocks. We're not asking Andrew Norwell to do quite as much as Tri Turner because he's not quite the athlete the tri-turner is. So is it better to make 90% of your blocks on blocks that are a 7 out of 10 difficulty,

or is it better to make 80% of your blocks on blocks that are a 9 out of 10 difficulty? And I went, you're 100% right. And it just reached that. And I'm thinking, how are we going to deal with this? What are we going to do? You know, this is, don't get me wrong. It didn't make the difference between Andrew and Orwell being here.

You know, they were both well-draided players, but he could certainly, you know, move fifth to sixth or whatever. And I realised that we had to do something we had to so we came up with a new process that for every single game was going to add another six or seven hours onto the onto what we were doing onto the data collection process called all blocking that would then go through and provide data that was allow us to go right here are all the pull blocks this is the average grade on this pull block this is the average for this reach block this is the average grade for this reach block and then be able to go better than expected, worse than expected, so you could take that into account.

And I think that little snippet sums up exactly what PFF is. It wasn't ever about trying to say that we were right. It was about, okay, tell us why we're wrong. Okay, so, yeah, no, you don't understand what the system is. So let us explain. Oh yeah, that's fine. Or like Mark and Rob, oh no, they're right. That's how, and then how do we make this better?

And even if it means that we are going, there is going to be a cost to the business and it's going to cost us a not insignificant amount of money. We don't care. You never 80-20 the data. You never, that was one of the rules in PFF. You know, there's various parts of your business, you'll 80-20. And that's fine. You know, you do. But you don't 80-20 the part that means the most. And that was the data. Sorry, 80-20 is the Pareto principle, which says you should work to try and get 80% of the benefit out of 20% of the effort. So make the 20% of the effort that gives you 80% of the benefits. Right. And you want it to be 100% or whatever it is in that formula onto the data being accurate. But that right there really amazed me of how much the NFL played a role and people within the league in formulating these grades. And there was an NFL general manager who said to me, like, we understand the weaknesses in the grades. We have weaknesses in our own internal grades.

And specifically, they talked about coverages where knowing coverage assignments is difficult for you, but it's also difficult for them. You don't know the plays. They don't know the plays. And that doesn't mean that every single grade you have agrees with every single grade inside the nfl but part of it is for you know coaches and teams if media is asking hey this guy's graded a 32 out of 100 uh what do you think's going on there they don't want to say oh yeah actually that grade is super accurate we also think he's terrible like you know that's they were never going to say that, you know, they wanted to, to have, I think, but if, of course, if you asked about the highest graded tackle in the league, oh yeah, he's great. He's wonderful. So it's, it's, but it's been such an interesting journey for me as a reporter to use this data

throughout my career and try to figure out how to use it correctly and how to take a grade and figure out what it all means. And I think that what PFF has never argued is that the grades are the complete answer to every single player, to every single question. And I think that's one of the things that drove PFF success is that it is impossible to answer every single question, but you tried. And so it kept driving. How can we answer that question? How can we answer that question? But I don't think anyone would ever argue that there are no holes in the data, but you have to just understand how to use them. So the way that I look at this is that we're just trying to fill in holes.

You're just trying to give people the opportunity to look at some data and make a decision. You know, I remember ASPN a little while ago, probably about five years ago, put out some stats. And I can't remember which player it was. And they said, this guy's never dropped a pass this year and I'm thinking that's bullshit so I go and grab all of the information that we think he's dropped a pass on it. There's about six players, five or six players where we think he's dropped a pass. And I just post on the back of the information, you know, ESPN posting something on Twitter that this guy has dropped no passes.

I just post, okay, so perhaps you can tell us whether you think these are drops or not. I'm not trying to be deliberately provocative, but what we're trying to do is we're trying to give people the facility to make up their own mind. You know, have a look at these plays and determine whether you think they're a drop or not. You know, and I think what most people would go is, well, maybe of the six that you've given, I would say at least four are drops

or some people would say three or some people would say one. But the one thing that nobody would say is that there was zero. That's the one. And the one thing that they said was there was and i would feel if i put out a thing like that if pff had put out something that said this guy has zero drop passes i would really want to go back almost through everything that was even remotely close and go, are you really sure? Because that's, you know, that's a big ask for anybody. And it all comes back to definitions as well. You know, what's the definition of a drop pass?

You know, so, and people have various definitions, but I think it's always been driven by not trying to tell somebody, this guy is the best. this guy is the worst. It's trying to say that this person or this player is, you know, ranked about here and he's ranked here in our system. Not saying that that's... We're not... It's impossible to say that that player is absolutely definitively the fourth best guard in the league.

But I think it's fairly reasonable to be able to say they're probably between the second and the ninth best ranked guard in the league. And, you know, and we can say that with a degree of accuracy i love error bars on everything i think it's my physics background you know show me some error bars and i'll be happy you know what what's the level of error on these things the other thing that a lot of people have said is your grades are subjective, such as, and by subjective, I think they mean you sort of, well, you're sniffing the air and you're putting your finger in and you're feeling the thing and you go on. Oh yeah. I think it's a 7.2. Yeah.

That performance was a 7.2 after watching it once, you know, that's, that's level of subjectivity. And my question on subjectivity and objectivity is, we have a grading scale that runs between minus two and plus two for every single player, for every single player, right? If I have a grading system and I can get five people on my team to grade that individual player on that individual player identically, is that subjective or objective? And how many people do I have to get to grade it identically for it to become objective? When does it become objective and when is it subjective? And as soon as you come up with a system and as soon as you get a method to measure that,

the same on each individual player, then I'm prepared to listen to that person, whoever they are in terms of their system and methodology, because that's a level that most people won't go to. So it's always slightly amusing when somebody on Twitter is prepared to, having watched the game once through, probably down the bar, the sports bar with the boneless wings and through five beers, is prepared to say that how could you rate this quarterback's performance at this level, despite the fact that you've had somebody grading them

individually on each individual play, you've had another person grade them individually on each individual play, you've had a third player going, the third person going through every single discrepancy between those two people, and then you've had somebody who's played quarterback at the NFL level, like Bruce Gretkowski or Zach Robinson or whatever, then going through and then running the rule over all of those for every single player. But you still know better. That's okay. You know, you're not going to get, you know, you're not going to get, some people still think the earth's flat, you know, at the end of the day. It's just the way it is. Folks, if you've been listening to the show,

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It's sticking out of the ocean and the rest of it's underneath and you don't see it. That's all the things that had to go into this and and again no one claims that there's pure perfection or that it is going to predict the future i mean matt flynn had one of the greatest quarterback games ever that didn't mean he was always going to be that guy and that's where i think it really like fascin me, is taking the data and painting a picture. And of course, this isn't just the grades. It's just the thing that everyone is so interested in. But it's the cornerback and how often they're targeted. Or it's an offensive lineman run blocking, pass blocking, different things like that.

And it's looking at this data, looking at what we know, the context, how they're being used, what their playing time is, the type of competition that they're facing, and trying to project forward what that's going to mean. So there are certain players where the data kind of makes you scratch your head. Like Marcus Davenport had great pass rushing grades, great pressures, and got a half a sack. And you went like, all right, well, so what that does for me as a journalist is I asked Marcus Davenport about it, and he said that there was some technical elements of where even though he was beating his guy, that wasn't actually the rush plan. So he graded well that he beat his man, but he wasn't in the right spot to sack the quarterback

because of how the play was supposed to be designed. And that is fascinating. And so that's, that's what I love about it. And that's, that's where I think you and I connect really well on this because it opens the doors for conversations and more discussion and more investigation. It doesn't close it and say, we have all the answers and there's nothing more to see here um so i mean for me personally it's just created endless amounts of ideas questions stories and things like that as i try to use it to get to the bottom of what is going on here in football

and there was a great example neil last week in a vikings Vikings game of how what you see on television might not tell you the truth, where Kirk Cousins threw a pass to K.J. Osborne and it whizzed right by his head. And it looked like K.J. Osborne was just like lost in the woods out there. Why wasn't he looking? What was going on? How does he not get his head around? He stinks. And of course, that's that was like 18 responses that I got on Twitter and I was at the game and I couldn't tell what happened until we actually looked at the coaches film from behind Kirk cousins, where you saw that he threw it earlier than he was supposed to.

He went from his first read to his second read and threw the ball and didn't really, I didn't time it quite correctly as KJ was going breaking out and then back in so it looked like as the camera pans over he's just like totally clueless when actually he wasn't out of his break yet and Kirk threw it early and so like we have to get those you know answers a lot of times after the game which we want to react during the game and yell at people and argue and everything else.

Cause that's football. I want to talk about though, like you getting teams to really buy into this data and what that process was like, because it's not just like you said, meeting with them and telling them, Hey, the grades aren't crazy,

but also like becoming a business and creating products for them, including PFF Ultimate, which has changed the way every NFL team, college team, CFL team, XFL team operates. And the number of people who, after I knew about Ultimate, wanted to talk to me about it was amazing because most people don't understand what Ultimate does or how it's changed the inside of NFL teams. So that sort of process from, hey, we've got these grades, we've got this information, to now having every team use PFF's product. Yeah, it's fantastic. I think there's one of the FBS teams still a holdout. And I got a text yesterday that says I think they're just about to come on board, so fingers crossed for the guys. So, and that would, I think probably within the next year or so,

every single game that's played above high school level, every single game of football will be game planned for on pff ultimate players will be scouted using pff ultimate and with pff data and those games will be graded by the pff team so i there there is nothing that has come close. There is no competitor that has got even a remote fraction of that marketplace in terms of what the guys have been able to deliver. Rick Drummond and the team have just done an unbelievable job. Mike Parker, who runs the service to the teams. And it's a real credit to them, but it never used to be like that so back in the day um when we used to turn up at the combine i used to remember i would i would do anything even

for a you know meeting with an nfl agent you know never mind a team i I didn't care. And we just wanted to show off our products. We wanted to get, you know, people didn't want to buy them. That's OK. Just help us get better. What is it you're looking for? What are the things that this isn't providing? So we eventually, on the back of the article that was done on the Wall Street Journal on me, Giants go along for number cruncher, we immediately got three calls from three teams, Miami Dolphins, the Carolina Panthers, and the Jacksonville Jaguars, who were interested in buying the data.

So I think they all took the data that year, and there may have been another couple of teams later on after training camp. So we maybe went from zero customers to five customers relatively quickly and very humbly just as we're about to try and renew the contract i went back the year after and started talking to them and asking them well would you please like to take our data again? And not all of them, but some of them, the feedback was, well, we're not sure that we got maximum use out of it. We're not sure that, you know, it's really good value for money.

So obviously you want to dig in. And you dig in and people become more and more open with you. And what I found out was that they really didn't have a methodology for using the data. They didn't have a way to manipulate the data. Some teams have all the technology in the world back in the day, and some have none. So we realized that we needed to go for the lowest common denominator, and we needed to produce some products for ourselves. You know, we were being very humble and just saying, look, here's the data. You guys will do a much better job of producing the product than we will.

And then i realized oh they don't know what to do some of the teams don't know what to do with it and that's the reason they don't want to get into it so over the course of a month i thought we're just going to need to give them a demonstration of capability what this data can do and they end perks and i sat down and we spent a month and i created something um that was called an offensive uh playbook or an offensive game plan offensive game sheet or whatever and essentially what it was it was about 30 pages of what i would want from the data if i was scouting a team. Rest assured, I know nothing. I'm just a guy making this stuff up. And I'm just, I'm basically wanting to provide them with something

so that they can look at it and go, yeah, yeah, that's okay, but this would be much, much better. So we produce this thing. You basically go through, select any team you want, press a button, and it will print out this 30-odd page scouting report, lovingly created by Neil Hornsby and Ian Perks together. These two British guys who don't know their ass from their elbow. And I have no idea why. I still have no idea why, but to this day, it was a massive hit. And one of my proudest moments two or three years ago, just before I retired, was we were trying to close it.

I don't want to get into too much technical detail, but there were runoff separate databases, the new system and the old system, and we needed to scrap the old scouting reports. I was thinking, oh, we'll just scrap, because they were run off the old database. Oh, we can't scrap them. Why can't we scrap them? There's loads of teams still using them.

In their same format, Carly, to be fair, had built all the defensive ones. I think Carly and Ian had built the defensive ones. But the offensive one, which was almost in exactly the same format, had to be rebuilt because teams were still using it. They were still printing them out and taking them onto the sidelines with them for games. Ten years later.

And the interesting thing is, who recoded it but my son? So there was a little bit of a cyclical um thing of this thing that i just thought was a demonstration of capability was still being used by nfl teams and we couldn't junk it so that was really the starting point and what we realized at that time was there will always be teams who will do a better job of this than we will. But there will always be teams that just don't have those capabilities. And then when we went on to sell college data, there's a lot of college teams that don't have anywhere near that. Not everybody is Alabama. Not everybody has all the resources that they want coming out of, you know, Wahoo or Texas.

You know, there's a lot of people who are still at the college level for who these scouting reports that were very easily done became gold dust. And those things, you know, we then came out of that and we were able to create Ultimate. And I think the balance was always, it's like any business, you're bringing in things from the outside to challenge the status quo, but you're listening to your customers and you're trying to find a balance. The customer, one of the things, you know, I heard back in the day, you know, when I was in business was the customer's always right. No, the customer's not always right. If the customer tells you they want this product and they want it for nothing, the customer's not right. You know, that's what they would like, but they're not always right. But the customer always deserves to be listened to and respected, always deserves to be listened to and respected. And you then should always feel that you can challenge the customer, that you can challenge that person and give them, and some people will be up for that challenge and some people won't some people will feel it a mark of disrespect that you've challenged them how dare you and other people will find it oh this is going to make us better and that combination that symbiotic relationship of customers who want to be better and a group of people who are not really concerned with making money but just making the best product possible was really what was the magic in the whole thing you know we were very lucky that we had a group of people who weren't in it for the status. They weren't in it for, you know, fame, fortune, money. They just wanted to work to make NFL teams better. Steve Palazzolo, Rick Drummond, Mike Parker,

all of these guys and the IT guys, you know, Jeff Lane and Kenny Glenn and Alex Padgett. And I'm sorry, I'm probably not naming all of them by any stretch of the imagination but all of these people just wanted to do things to help the customers be better but weren't just going to let the customer say I want this and this and this and not put any challenge back on it because that's not that's just that's just doing what you want not what you need and I I think the best relationships are always the one where there's a little degree of challenge backwards and forwards to come up with the best possible scenario for everybody and that

was I think why we were so successful because those people were all pushing in the same direction. and working together to try to, to push this, the product, not just the grades as we talked about, but the entire product to be better, but also to operate in a way that would impact what they actually needed. Practically. It's not just here's your data, but it's how does this make my job easier? And the biggest thing that football people said to me was it saved me so many hours of things we were going to do anyway but somebody else watched the film and tracked you know what coverage was played in the red zone on third and ten or whatever and they are using this every single building to as you said

game plan for every game and now what i love about this i was just talking to our friend austin gale the other day and what i love about this is that the it's gone from checkers to chess in the NFL. I mean, the game planning matchups now because with computers where chess players study computer analysis. And so I know the same computer analysis as my opponent. So one of the things is how can I change what I'm doing to go away from the computer analysis but still trick you and force you into a situation where you don't know the computer analysis. It's kind of like that with the data in the NFL. And so there's this amazing game that's going on in each building where it's, they know our data, we know our data. How can we break tendencies?

How can we change things to, to, to make one play that's going to be different. And that is just profound to me and why football is the absolute best game. So there's a hundred more stories that are in the book and that could be told on the podcast. And if I let you, you absolutely will tell every single one of them. But I want people to read them. So let me ask you this question. And I probably asked you this three or four different times as we were doing the whatever number of interviews that we did during writing the book. There are multiple people that said to me, Neil Hornsby belongs in the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a contributor.

And that hit me like a train. I just like that the way your company has changed the game that the former analytics guy for the New York Giants, John Berger, who's a good friend of yours, Paul Alexander. I mean, these are, these are very credible people in the NFL saying Neil Hornsby belongs in the hall of fame. What, what does that mean to you? What, cause I texted you that immediately. I couldn't wait for that to come out in the book. What did that mean to you to hear that from people in the game that you worked with? Oh, it's incredibly humbling. I think you're always in a place where you just want to try and be realistic and go, yeah, that's very nice of you. And you don't want to be derogatory to those people, but I disagree. You know, this is, this is, I disagree. There's, there's, I, to be honest,

I disagreed when they brought in contributors to the Hall of Fame. I wanted it to be coaches and players only. I just thought that was, you know, it's about the players on the field at the end of the day. They're the ones who are, you know, and and the coaches and that's what it should have stayed um but there's contributors and there's contributors i just i and the rest of the team just wanted to be involved in football that was that was it all we wanted to do back in the day was get involved with high-end fans in the States. We just wanted to have a discourse.

We just wanted to have a conversation. Now, when I would go to the gym, you know, every day, nobody wanted to talk about the NFL on a Monday morning. You know, they all wanted to talk about, you know, how Liverpool had done or how Manchester United had done or, you know, whatever, or a rugby game or something like that. Nobody wanted to talk about, you know, how Liverpool had done or how Manchester United had done or, you know, whatever, or a rugby game or something like that. Nobody wanted to talk about it.

So the only methodology to talk to people was, you know, on the internet and the people that you wanted to talk to were the high-end fans in the States. We just got lucky. You know, we were in the right place at the right time. I think one of the things that people have talked about is where does data go from here? You know, where does football data go? And as you know, I'm into, you know, personal fitness and training and all that sort of stuff.

And one of the things that you get into you know is fat loss you know and one of the guys has a an analogy a guy called lane norton if anybody's into nutrition and for bodybuilding or for fitness he has an analogy about losing fat and it's core and it's to do with um you're wringing out a towel and he said losing fats like wringing out a towel when you start you get a lot of water for not a lot of effort but by the time you get to the end to get the most minute amount of water or to get the most amount of fat it's massive effort and that's the analogy for fat and i thought about that and i thought

that's the same with data in football that's the same with data and the same with getting it out we were very lucky that we hit a time when the towel was still absolutely full of water and we didn't have to put an awful lot of effort in to get a lot of water out we got a lot of water out in a very short period of time i think the nfl is now in a stage where you are having to squeeze very very hard to get any more juice out of that towel. And the problem for a lot of people is most people, a lot of people fall into the category of they don't want to work very hard to get that water out. They want to get it out for nothing.

You know what the NFL has become like these days. You see it in Twitter every day, which is people just want to make statements and utilise it. I mean, we're at the sad state now in football and football content where people are reporting on what other content providers are saying. Like, what? Why? For what possible reason?

You know, people are more interested in engagement than providing new data. There's still some data there. There's still some really good data there. But you have to be like you are and like a number of other people in the business are. You have to work hard to find that data and to get it and to come up with things that are new and exciting. We were lucky, you know, and I don't know that, to go back to your original question, being lucky by being in the right place at the right time is a criteria, you know, for a Hall of Fame or anything like that.

You know, I think we worked hard and we provided new data, but we were also very lucky to be in the right place at the right time when there was a ton of water still in that towel to be squeezed out. I think for somebody to come along now and do something similar is going to be incredibly hard, and it's going to need somebody who's going to work incredibly hard not somebody who's going to just hope that something goes viral you know that that that's their that's their you know somebody once pointed out to me hope is not a strategy but

you know sorry that's a long day as you always know with me Matthew you're going to's a long day. As you always know with me, Matthew, you're going to get a long answer to a very simple, straightforward question. Yes, I'm delighted that people think that we have provided value to the NFL. Delighted. Couldn't be happier. But Hall of Fame, I'm sorry, that's a stage too far for me it's probably one too far i think that it was just the highest compliment they could give um and i think it's

deserved because what's hard for you to realize and what i came to know of you or for you to process, I think you realize, but don't process the, the tentacles and the impact that PFF has had. And I told the story in the book about Tej Seth, who was a PFF intern who would have a huge football fan and a brilliant guy, but would have had really no barrier to, or the barrier to enter football in any stage would be impossible for him before data. And because he's a brilliant math person that he, and he has been able to use PFF data and the opportunity he got as an intern to build a career that he loves. And his, there's so many people who are like that that you don't even know about and there's so many ways that it's impacting every single game that you watch and i won't spoil one

of my favorite parts of the book but there are very important football games that have been decided by game planning using pff ultimate that you're watching a game each week, knowing that your product is impacting that, but also my life, Tasia's life, Eric Eager's life, all the, all these people. Um, and, and I, that's probably hard to, I mean, what are you supposed to say? He's supposed to jump up and down and say, you know, but, uh, I think that I, I think that after getting to know you, I know how much that means to you, uh, even though you have great humility about it. So, Neil, somebody said to me when I started writing the book, before we ever sat down, that they said, you won't meet five more interesting people in your life than Neil Hornsby. And after

getting to know you, I completely agree with that. I'm not sure there's going to be more than one. You are a fascinating person. It was an absolute honor to write this book about PFF and to have you as the main character of the book to tell your story. I can't thank you enough. I mean, that's not even to say enough how much I appreciate all the many, many hours that you spent with me, that we spent making sure we got everything right and trying to go through all the details and how open you were. And also people should know as well that when I first called you about the idea, you said, tell it warts and all, which I had never heard that phrase before, but I understood it. And that's what we did. And so it was, it's a rocky ride at times through your story to get to where PFF is now,

but it's an incredible one. Football is a numbers game, Amazon, wherever you get books, PFF, and how a data-driven approach shook up the game is the name of the book. So Neil, again, an honor to have you on the show, an honor to write this book about you. And I cannot thank you enough. I really appreciate it. Oh, it's always a pleasure, Matthew. It's I love talking to you. I love talking about business. I love talking about football. It's, you know, and at the end of the day, all you're trying to do is get better, right? You know,

you're trying to improve, you're trying to learn, you're trying to do some stuff. I, I love listening to you talk about your new business and how we you know and picking things up from you it's it's life's fun isn't it it's just a journey and if you can't enjoy it then what's the point yeah i'm more than just a book that i got to write i also got an entire business education as well along the way and uh purple insider's doing good so yeah hugely deserved hugely deserved you know it's good when when good guys come out on top i'm always happy yeah it's that's been fun too because even when we first started talking purple insider was very new and now it's stable and it's operating and uh we got a book on the shelf. So very, very cool. Thanks again, Neil Hornsby.

You're the best man. And I guarantee we'll be talking again very soon.