Numbers Game: Gators, UF Team Up to Get Ahead in Growing World of Sports Analytics
Thursday, January 18, 2024 | General, Scott Carter
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By: Scott Carter, Senior Writer
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — He is a true believer, a connoisseur of the games we play and armed with an investigative mind toward the possibilities revealed by the numbers.
Brian Levine is no latecomer to the analytics era of modern sports. Analyzing data is part of his DNA and a driving force in his professional life. Levine graduated from the University of Florida in 1992 and earned an MBA in finance two years later from Emory University. That background propelled him into a career on Wall Street, where he spent 25 years with Goldman Sachs in New York and London, rising to partner level and co-head of the organization's global equities trading and execution services.
Levine retired in his late 40s and turned his attention to various endeavors, including several in the sports world. He served as CEO of Major League Pickleball, has spoken at the MIT Sloan Analytics Sports Conference, and is a minority investor in the NHL's Las Vegas Golden Knights and Venezia FC, a professional soccer team in Italy.
UF graduate Brian Levine, right, with Las Vegas Golden Knights veteran Jack Eichel, center, after Vegas won the Stanley Cup in 2023. (Photo: Courtesy of Levine)
"At Goldman Sachs, I did a lot on the analytics side, particularly in regards to automating the trading business,'' Levine said. "Combined with my interest in sports, I've always been very interested in sports analytics."
Levine discovered a kindred spirit in Gators men's basketball coach Todd Golden last summer in Omaha when the two had time to talk in-depth while there to watch the UF baseball team in the College World Series. The 38-year-old Golden is a full-fledged member of the current generation of young coaches who value analytics and how they can help you win as much as a combo guard with quick feet.
For Levine, a member of the University Athletic Association Board and suite holder at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium with fellow UF graduate and finance partner Scott Friedman, the conversations with Golden inspired him the way baseball analytics did when he was in college and wrote a paper on total-value statistics that was submitted to Sports Illustrated.
They got each other.
"He's particularly proactive on the analytics side,'' Levine said. "He wants to do much more, and I've always believed college sports in general, despite the money that's there, has been very much behind the curve in adapting to analytics."
Levine's interest stretches far outside that of a fan in tune with numbers beyond the score.
He is a longtime financial booster of the Gators — Levine met his wife Beth in 1990 while both were UF students — and an enthusiastic supporter of a multi-faceted initiative announced earlier this month by UF President Ben Sasse. The UF & Sport Collaborative is a five-part program that marries UF's resources with the UAA's and includes $2.5 million of support from Sasse's strategic funding initiative. The partnership comprises the UAA and five UF schools (College of Health and Human Performance, Warrington College of Business, College of Journalism and Communications, College of Medicine and the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering).
The program aims to advance UF's global standing in sports performance, healthcare, and communication. The project directly connects to the UAA in multiple ways, including gathering raw data through wearable sensors that UF student-athletes use and that the UAA has collected information for several seasons. The two components that tie most directly to the UAA are Gator AccelerAItor for Sport Analytics in partnership with the UF men's basketball program — Levine and Golden can do some actual deep-dives someday — and AI-Powered Athletics, an enterprise between the UAA and the College of Health and Human Performance to build an infrastructure to enable AI-powered athletics based on the data from the wearable sensors.
"UF is a national leader in sports performance and healthcare, and we're ready to showcase our offerings and strengthen our partnerships on a much larger scale," Sasse said in a press release. "The UF & Sport Collaborative will help take our reputation in sports to the next level and greatly improve our already outstanding athletics."
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Spencer Thomas is the UAA's performance analytics and testing coordinator. A former athletic trainer with the football program, Thomas' mission is to help student-athletes minimize their time on the sideline and optimize their performance.
He has served for two years as the head of the UAA's efforts to utilize the performance data gathered from the wearable sensors and provide beneficial information to coaches and athletes. As part of the funding, the department will receive $1 million to hire additional staff and increase resources in conjunction with assistant professor Dr. Jen Nichols in the College of Engineering. Nichols focuses broadly on musculoskeletal biomechanics in her research.
Spencer Thomas heads a department at the UAA that collects data from wearable sensors on student-athletes. (Photo: Maddie Washburn/UAA Communications)
Much like Levine, Thomas sees a landscape of opportunity in college athletics regarding analytics and their real-world application. When he starts discussing the potential, the data points burst from his mouth like fireworks: maximum velocity, variable heart rates, risk ratios, pelvis stability, sleep patterns, knee movements, predictive analysis, and on and on.
"What I have been trying to do is to slowly build something that is sustainable," Thomas said. "We have a lot of great athletes here. It could benefit a lot of people."
The additional resources and ability to translate the data with the help of UF's AI program is uncharted territory for those in the UF athletic department, whose primary focus is helping student-athletes perform their best and stay healthy.
That generally includes five areas: strength/conditioning, mental health, nutrition, performance/analytics and athletic training.
"There's a lot of data coming in from our student-athletes from some things we're already doing,'' said Stacey Higgins, UF associate athletics director. "To be able to pull UF into that is really going to help take us to a different level. I'm excited about it."
Thomas and UAA officials had their first meeting with UF personnel last week to launch their part of the initiative. He envisions a day when the Gators have a database full of information on each student-athlete that players and coaches can access to understand better how to reach optimal performance.
It will take time, but with the help of AI, perhaps shorter than you might think.
"We already have a foundation built,'' Thomas said. "We have an opportunity to do something special."
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As the Gators dive deeper into analytics, Levine is someone they can turn to for guidance. The possibilities are endless in his view, from building a recruiting database that serves coaches while they are Gators to developing programs that calculate a player's actual NIL value or help construct future schedules.
What he knows is that you must start somewhere down the road toward a more analytical future in college sports.
"If you don't have a systematic infrastructure, you are starting from scratch,'' he said. "That's like the beauty of this. And I'm talking like someone from Goldman Sachs. If we had some trader who left for a hedge fund, if the trading strategies that made us money walked out the door with him or her, that would be incredibly painful for us.
"It's systematic. Coaches come and go. It stays with the institution. We want to build that at the University of Florida." Tennis great Ivan Lendl, left, with Brian Levine and his wife, Beth Levine, on Wednesday after Lendl and Levine won the Boca Raton Pickleball Masters. (Photo: Courtesy of Levine)
Levine can talk about sports analytics for hours and has plenty of insightful anecdotes. He has spoken baseball with Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg and President Matt Silverman, a pair of fellow Goldman Sachs alums who have proven analytics can deliver winning teams on a small-market payroll.
One of Levine's favorite examples of how analytics have crept into the NFL more recently came from one of his former interns at Goldman Sachs.
You may have seen him go viral on social media over the weekend as he waited by the locker room door to greet each Cleveland Browns coach and player after their playoff loss to Houston. Andrew Berry is a former Harvard player who became the youngest general manager in NFL history in 2020 when he assumed that role in Cleveland.
Berry, who interned at Goldman Sachs under Levine in 2009, spent the 2019 season with the Eagles as vice president of football operations. Philadelphia won the Super Bowl in 2017 with the help of the Philly Special, an analytics-driven trick play on fourth-and-goal that resulted in a scoring pass from former Gators standout Trey Burton to quarterback Nick Foles.
Former Gators receiver Cris Collinsworth, the NBC analyst during the game, was surprised at then-Eagles coach Doug Pederson's gamble.
Berry told Levine that he learned from his stint in Philadelphia how different the game can look on the field when you have support in the building from the very top, in Pederson's case, Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie.
"The data shows that there is a lot of expected value in going for it more often,'' Levine said. "Lurie was pitched on how they should go for it much more often, and he basically said to them, 'I've got your back. I believe in this fourth-down thing. If anyone ever gets fired, it's not going to be because of that.'
"The point is, to affect this sort of change, you need at the top this cultural belief that you are going to play for the long term. I think that's why in college, no one is building out a five-year analytics program because no one knows how long they are going to be there."
The UF & Sport Collaborative is out to change that.
"We have a new president that's very much focused on developing our AI program, and he also happens to be a pretty big sports fan, too,'' Levine said. "It feels like the stars kind of aligned to trailblaze this opportunity."
