Nearly two months ago in July, the news broke the Pittsburgh Steelers were losing Football Analyst Will Britt to the Dallas Cowboys. That move is official, Britt is now crunching numbers for Jerry Jones, and at the time, we wondered if the team would replace his role.
As of the start of the season, it doesn’t appear so.
According to the Steelers.com website, there’s no new football analyst listed. But the site is notoriously slow to update its staffers and isn’t the most trustworthy source for recent hires. However, the team recently released its updated 2023 media guide and there’s no other analyst listed.
Though it’ll hardly make or break their season, the lack of an apparent hire comes as a mild surprise. GM Omar Khan seems to embrace analytics more than the old-school Kevin Colbert did, something that’s evident in the way Khan (and even Mike Tomlin) has talked and in some of the things ex-scouts have said, like Mark Gorscak.
On the site and in the teams media guide, the only football analyst is Tosin Kazeem, hired in 2019. Over the years, Pittsburgh has been criticized for not leaning into analytics enough and they’ve had one of the league’s smallest staffs. It appears the team will head into the season with Kazeem as the only one officially in that role. The Steelers have also had plenty of turnover in that department, losing Karim Kassam, Jay Whitmire, and now Britt to other jobs and NFL teams in recent years. Turnover in that world may be more common than other places but Pittsburgh has struggled to replace them, too.
Perhaps the team has made a late hire that wasn’t done in time to make the media guide. Maybe it’ll be updated on the team site later in the season; in fairness to them, losing Britt occurred pretty late in the process. But for now, it seems to only be Kazeem wearing that analytic hat.
Pittsburgh does have a slew of “data analysts” but they appear to be more involved in the business than creating anything into the team’s gameplan. For example, Brandon Wu is listed as a data analyst but on the team site, listed under the Steelers’ Business Analytics department. Melanie Harris is the head of that department and per her Linkedin page, these are some of her duties.
Clearly not analytics in the football sense.
Of course, the number of hires in these departments only mean so much. What matters more is how the team collects, interprets, and uses this data. That does seem to be more prevalent under Khan but adding more staff to help in a highly competitive world where franchises like the Cowboys have a whole team of people working on it would help even the playing field.
