The Pittsburgh Steelers have hired Krithi Chandrakasan into a football research role, according to ESPN’s Seth Walder on X.
“Chandrakasan previously was the Bears’ Director of Football Analytics. He worked for the Chiefs before his stint in Chicago,” Walder wrote.
All teams have adopted some form of football analytics into the way they do business as the art has grown, but some teams have been more resistant than others.
The Steelers have traditionally taken a more old-school approach. They were voted among the least analytical front offices in 2024. The Baltimore Ravens, by contrast, are widely regarded as one of the most advanced teams in the league when it comes to their analytics department. It’s a major factor in how they make decisions both on and off the field. You rarely hear about analytics in Pittsburgh, but that is slowly changing under Omar Khan’s new front office regime.
Chandrakasan isn’t listed on their website yet, but he already listed the team as his employer on LinkedIn. He will join Tosin Kazeem (Football Analytics Coordinator), Donovan Moore (Football Analyst), and Jake Clancy (Scouting Intern/Analyst) as now four employees with a focus on analytics.
The Bears parted ways with Chandrakasan after the 2024 season, but he was in their draft war room during the 2024 NFL Draft (h/t Arjun Menon on X.) He had been with the team since January 2022.
Prior to his role with the Bears, Chandrakasan climbed the corporate ladder in the Kansas City Chiefs front office. He was initially hired in 2019 as a data analyst and promoted every offseason from data scientist to ultimately a senior data scientist. He also briefly served as an analytics intern for one offseason with the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2016.
This screengrab of a Bears analytics slideshow from Piano Emeritus on X doesn’t paint Chandrakasan’s tenure there in a great light. His analytics model had Justin Fields, Chase Claypool, and Velus Jones as their highest-rated players. I don’t know the full context of the screenshot, or when it was taken, but it might offer insight into the Bears’ lopsided trade they eventually offered the Steelers.
With a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and Economics and a cross-registered Economics degree from Harvard, he held multiple roles outside the football world, including being the Chief Analytics Officer at Stealth Startup.
The Steelers have had trouble holding onto their analytics staff over the years under Kevin Colbert. He was on record stating his belief that analytics are overused in football. but they are starting to modernize with Omar Khan.
Kazeem joined the team in 2019 and was promoted to his current coordinator role last offseason. Moore and Clancy both joined the front office last offseason in their current roles. They lost Jay Whitmire in 2021 to the New York Jets and lost Karim Kassam in 2019 to DuoLingo. That much turnover could possibly mean their work wasn’t being valued enough in the organization, or they weren’t being paid enough to be competitive in the job market. Either way, it resulted in a gutted analytics department for the Steelers.
Don’t expect to hear much about the analytics staff as they operate behind the scenes, but it’s a positive development for an organization that has been stuck in the past in a lot of ways.
