Side Hustling as an Analyst for Pro Football Focus

If you aren't watching six football games at once, you aren't trying.

Today’s version of the IBT Interview series features Pearse Lehmann, a data analyst for Pro Football Focus. If you’ve ever wondered how PFF comes up with its hyper-specific stats then you should read on, because the interview with Pearse was a good one.

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Would you mind giving us a little introduction as to who you are and what you do?

I’m Pearse Lehmann. I work for Lockheed Martin as a software engineer, but I also work a side hustle as a data analyst or data collector for Pro Football Focus, usually covering NCAA games and player participation.

Compared to my time delivering for DoorDash, that’s one of the coolest side hustles I have ever heard of. How did you get into doing data analysis for PFF?

I always loved football throughout my entire life. I started collecting cards and that’s how it started, I was like, “Oh, football’s cool.” So I started playing.

I got into it and then I seemed to have a knack for, you know, football knowledge and actually being interested in the X’s and O’s of the game more than most people. So, after I stopped playing because I suck, I kept following the NFL, obviously. The NFL is charted by PFF and PFF is a big, now huge, company for football.

One day, I was scrolling through Twitter and [PFF] had a little ad saying “collectors needed, apply today” so I applied to that and went through a couple of trials. We did the Clemson – Ohio State game, that was the first trial.

By “did”, I mean I did the player participation collection for that game, then after that, I did another [game]. And if you did good enough, [PFF] would give you an interview. And then, if you do good enough in the interview, they’ll hire you as a part time collector. That’s how I got into it.

So is a lot of this data collection manual?

Yeah. Almost all manual. PFF does have this software called a Training ADAT, where you can put each play in and then populate those plays with where the players were, if they’re bunched, what position [they played], if they blocked, ran, or passed, stuff like that. So there’s the software that you input data into, but you have to input every single data point for every player into it.

That sounds like a tremendous amount of work. Are you ever nervous that you’ll miss something?