Data science and analytics, including sports analytics, offer bright career futures. It starts, says Luddy School Computer Science Professor Memo Dalkilic, by “looking for the impossible.”
Forget limits. When it comes to data science and analytics, sports analytics in particular, all things are possible. The Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering and Memo Dalkilic, professor of computer science, are at the forefront.
“I always tell students you shouldn’t be limited by what you think you can do now,” Dalkilic says from his Luddy Hall third-floor office. “You should look for the impossible and find your way to that. That’s why I think the degree in sports analytics is so exciting. Young people are actually driving this whole area.”
The result could deliver analytics careers that will withstand AI’s growing dominance with results that captivate people worldwide.
Dalkilic encourages students to “look for the impossible.”
Credit: Luddy School Communications.“What I would say to you as someone who’s a practicing data scientist,” Dalkilic says, “is that data helps me make more informed decisions. That’s what data science is about.”
Data science offers many specializations, including biology, systems and foundations. The Luddy School and the IU School of Public Health have partnered for a sports analytics specialization.
Dalkilic says students typically take four to five courses across the university, most of it is focused on mathematics, statistics, and computer science as well as data science.
Luddy’s data science degree is considered a university degree. It’s housed in computer science, but is a joint degree with mathematics and statistics. Dalkilic calls sports analytics “a very interesting area within data science.” He says the degree involves a great deal of programming.
“We use AI-fixed data analytics to solve all sorts of problems across diverse domains,” he says.
Dalkilic says the School of Public Health’s analytics degree focuses on sports marketing and management. Luddy’s degree develops skills in nomenclature, outstanding issues and the kind of computation using AI that students would use in the practice of sports analytics.
“This could be prediction of games, improving strategies, minimizing injuries, and a whole host of other areas,” he says. “We’re on the cusp of this because now there are some schools around the nation that are offering this degree. Florida is one of the well-known ones. They don’t have a data science degree built like ours, but it’s sports analytics.”
Strong student interest has caused Luddy to start its first sports analytics club. Dalkilic says he estimates as many as a quarter of freshmen data science students are strongly interested.
Next year, the Luddy School will offer its first sports analytics class, “where we develop solving problems with sports data.”
Sports once relied on what Dalkilic calls “legacy statistics,” which is what he says people used for the past 70 years, such as runs batted in for baseball or yards per carry in football.
“That made sense when you didn’t have AI, big data, and computing,” he said. “Now, we can do a lot more. We can ask questions that perhaps couldn’t have been asked before. For instance, team chemistry. There are no real stats on team chemistry, but it’s an important element if you talk to coaches and players. We can start addressing what that means. It’s exciting to figure out how to build new types of information around athletics.”
Dalkilic’s enthusiasm for sports analytics reflects a love of sports honed by growing up in Austin, Texas with the University of Texas, which has won four national titles, the last coming in 2005. He attended home football games with his parents and still went to games long after moving to Bloomington.
Now, the Hoosiers, under football head coach Curt Cignetti and his veteran staff, have joined the ranks of the sport’s superpowers with last season’s unprecedented national title, energizing IU’s 805,000-strong alumni base to levels never preciously seen.
“It was very exciting that IU won a national football championship,” Dalkilic says. “Now, I can proudly say I’m affiliated with two (championship) programs. I try to go as to as many IU football games as I can. I’m a strong supporter of Coach Cignetti.”
Can analytics help sports teams and players?
“It’s a really interesting point of perspective,” Dalkilic says. “We might be interested in helping an individual player. How does the player perform better? How does the player work well within a coaching strategy? How does a player work well with his team? How does a player anticipate injuries?
“On the flip side, how does a coach develop strategies? How does a coach minimize injuries? How does a coach prepare for games? How does a coach change strategy, perhaps mid-game, to address weakness during a game? There are so many, many kinds of things we can do.”
That even includes driving down concession costs during sporting events.
“How do we effectively bring snacks and drinks to students and fans in a way that helps them enjoy the game,” Dalkilic says, “but also helps with cost?”
Dalkilic says analytics offers exciting job opportunities, now and in the future.
“I would say we’re on the cusp of it. We already have people working in this area, but the vocation itself hasn’t settled upon the actual nomenclature yet.
Dalkilic says data science helps people make “more informed decisions.”
Credit: Photo supplied by Memo Dalkilic.“That’s always been a challenge in technology. We have new technology, but there are no jobs that describe that actual technology. We need some time before they recognize both the name and what it does.
“AI is a perfect example. Right now, probably it’s proliferated too much and obscured what people do. The hiring is trying to adjust with what the needs and the skills are. Sports analytics is no different.”
Analytics fits well with fantasy sports, a growing economic powerhouse. An estimated 40 million people play fantasy football, with another 10 million focused on other fantasy sports. The $9 billion to $11 billion industry is expected to soar past $21 billion in the next 10 years.
“I think many students enjoy fantasy sports,” Dalkilic says, “so there’s an element there that has to be addressed in some way, legal constraints that need to be understood.”
Meanwhile, students are already reaping the benefits.
“One of the outstanding outcomes of our degree has been students have gotten internships on their own,” Dalkilic said. “So many, in fact, that we’ve changed the degree to count internships as part of their requirements, if they so choose to do one. And once you have an internship, I think the likelihood is something like 80 percent that you get a job.”
As an example, Dalkilic says a pickleball startup company brought in a Luddy student and was so impressed, it contacted Dalkilic about working with more students.
“Companies need to understand who they’re looking for and what needs to be done,” he says. “Students need to make sure they understand what the jobs require. Again, in a few years, we’re going to settle on the vocabulary and skills needed.”
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