Cris Collinsworth buys a chunk of Pro Football Focus.
This is an interesting story. From his home in England, Neil Hornsby, one of the biggest football fans on the planet, and his staff at Pro Football Focus have made a business of analyzing the performance of every player on every snap and grading their performances against every other player at the same position. Born in 2006, Pro Football Focus has done such a thorough job that 13 teams have contracts with the company to provide the kind of data on players and formations they can’t get anywhere else.
So this spring, Collinsworth was looking to improve his data collection and signed up for an annual insider’s subscription to PFF. The free part of the site looked real, but he wanted to know more, and so he filled in the email contact form asking for someone to get back to him. Hornsby, with his thick English accent, phoned up. “I thought I’d been scammed,’’ Collinsworth said. “So I figured I would ask him a bunch of questions, you know, to expose him … and after about five minutes I could tell he was absolutely legit, so I just shut up and listened to Neil talk about football at a very high level.”
At first Collinsworth said he wanted to simply get to know more about all 32 teams without having to do the kind of film study and painstaking research that would take a couple of days at least—in his words, “to be in position Monday morning to know what would normally take me till Tuesday night to know.’’ Collinsworth said he was actually thinking of engaging some people to watch NFL tape and grade it for him until he realized PFF already did it, and did it accurately. So last week he reached an agreement with Horsnby to buy a significant stake in the company. Hornsby and his crew of 12 full-time graders continue, and Collinsworth will use his influence to help grow the company and seek out new business for it.
There was one final test for Collinsworth. He and Hornsby separately graded a game. When they compared notes, their grades were very close. “And when we went back over them,’’ Collinsworth said, “I’d say on 50 percent of the discrepancies, they were right and I was wrong.”
The deal came together in a couple of months this summer, culminating last week. “What really impressed me,’’ said Collinsworth, “is the fact that 13 NFL teams have contracted with Pro Football Focus for their data. I mean, I have been around the NFL for over 30 years, I know how hard it is to get behind the wall of those teams. And they’ve got 13 teams to trust their data. That’s huge.”
“What appealed to me was Cris is interested in football for the right reasons—for pure football reasons,” said Hornsby, who has been a guest on my training camp tour for the past several years. “People like Cris want legitimate content. And I think he’ll help us get in front of other people who realize that legitimate content has an important place with the public today.”
Peter King wrote: