Caserio reveals Patriots’ hidden analytics operation
Belichick prefers players with brains over brawn
Two weeks ago, Patriots owner Robert Kraft made headlines by revealing the front office has tweaked its scouting process after several years of lackluster drafting.
Within the same press conference, Kraft may have hinted at those changes by making two unprompted mentions of analytics in response to larger questions about team-building.
Ten days later, a former Patriots executive indirectly took Kraft’s peek behind the personnel curtain and ripped it open.
On April 8, Texans general manager Nick Caserio spoke on a virtual panel at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference exploring the future of NFL roster building. Caserio led the Pats’ personnel department from 2008-2020, so present employees aside, no one understands their front office better than him. While his old boss Bill Belichick might poo-poo analytics at every public opportunity, Caserio killed the notion once and for all the Patriots don’t incorporate advanced data into their decision-making.
“What we’ve learned,” he began, “is it’s in every facet of football operations to some degree.”
Specific to the draft, Caserio shared the Patriots recently developed a model to help them identify traits most common to successful NFL players at a particular position. The front office ran players through the model by entering data points that represented their performative and athletic characteristics. Among the team’s findings, Caserio said, was that widely held beliefs about height and arm length being vital to success were unfounded.
There was no correlation between those traits and pro production.
“Some of our best players, they didn’t have the requisite quote-unquote length,” Caserio said, “but they were some of our best players.”
Which position was it? An educated guess would be offensive tackle.
As prospects, Isaiah Wynn and Jermaine Eluemunor, the Pats’ 2020 Week 1 starters, and Marcus Cannon, who started for several years, and new swing tackle Justin Herron all ranked in the 45th percentile or lower for arm length among offensive tackles. The Patriots picked Wynn in the first round three years ago and drafted Herron last sprint. Both have been hits, and, like Eluemunor, stand 6-foot-4 or shorter.
As for other measurements, it appears the Patriots couldn’t care much less about 40-yard dash times.
Seriously.
“I don’t want to say the 40 is like the least important number,” Caserio said, “but quite frankly, it might be the least important number, specific to certain positions.”
Caserio initially cited offensive linemen, an obvious choice for 40time pointlessness, but fresher, more telling examples abound. The Pats’ first-rounders that followed Wynn, running back Sony Michel and wide receiver N’Keal Harry, clocked 40 times that ranked in the 54th and 44th percentile of their positions. Belichick drafted them anyway.
Though speed aside, neither was viewed as a worthy of a first-round pick by most of the analytics community. Michel didn’t deliver enough value as a running back, while Harry owned a middling yards per route run average and posted a significant chunk of his numbers against subpar competition. But again, the Pats took them anyway.
That’s likely because, as Caserio detailed, drafting is an evolving blend of art and science.
“It’s never about scouting versus analytics. It’s really a hybrid model,” he said. “The teams that are probably going to have the most success are really the ones that are able to develop this hybrid mode of thinking. And scouts are a valuable piece of what you’re trying to do relative to team-building.”
Across the NFL, scouts’ chief duties are to gather information more meaningful than physical measurements. That information, which often pertains to background and mental makeup, can’t be entered into a model. For example, according to Caserio, Patriots evaluators often ask questions like, how does he learn? How does he work? How does he adapt?
One wrong answer can — and often does — remove a player from the Pats’ draft board.
On the other hand, according to reports, Harry thoroughly impressed Belichick in his pre-draft interview, which went a long way to sealing his selection. The Patriots prize the mental side of football.
In fact, aside from team-friendly quarterback contracts, arguably the greatest competitive advantage they’ve maintained is prioritizing smart players who unlock all chapters of their playbooks at the expense of a small trade-off in athleticism. The world’s greatest athletes won’t see the field in New England if they can’t cut it first in the classroom. Or take a public tongue-lashing from Belichick after weeks of punishing practices and heavy lifting by NFL standards.
More than that, players need to live that rigorous grind over and over again. Take it from Cam Newton.
When Newton signed last year, he was already more accomplished, tested and seasoned than 99% of the league. He was a former MVP, No. 1 overall pick and face of a franchise, who passed and ran and understood what it meant to sacrifice his body and mind for football over nine years in Carolina. So what did he learn in New England? Competitive stamina. “Every ounce of second, minutes, time and hours was accounted for, and the mental focus that you need in that building is heightened by the fact of one thing and one thing only,” Newton told WEEI after the season. “It was the expectation of not doing something to get it right. It was more or less doing something until you can’t get it wrong anymore.”
Like other teams, the Patriots have employed psychological tests to drill down on prospects’ mental makeup. Because those characteristics, Caserio believes, are more predictive of success than any physical trait.
“What you’re trying to figure out is who can sustain whatever their level of performance is over long periods of time,” he explained before later adding: “Is that based on how fast a player runs or how high he jumps? No. There are some other things that are going to be more important.”
Of course, not all tough players pan out. Whenever the Pats’ physical or mental criteria at a position has failed, the front office uses that information to revise its models and re-teach scouts.
Short arms on an offensive tackle? Don’t worry about it.
He’s a tough receiver who can’t get open? Let’s weigh separation a little more next time.
They exhaust all of this energy, study and calculation for what Caserio calls a 50-50 proposition: the draft. Each pick is a primetime coin flip that devolves slowly into a dice roll with each passing round.
“What we’re doing is total projection. There’s no experts on this,” Caserio said. “It’s an absolute projection.”
For the Patriots, their odds have been closer to a dice roll for far too long. The upcoming draft represents an opportunity to continue resetting and return to contention; the chance to prove the competitive edge they believe they’ve built inside their building still exists and will shine again.