New Business of Sports Institute Brings Big Names and Ideas to Summit
By Alberta Phillips
The Texas McCombs Business of Sports Institute launched in September with a bold-names symposium that spotlighted luminaries from the sports and business worlds. They gave UT students a rare, inside look at careers and opportunities in the booming sports industry.
The Texas Business of Sports Summit, held on campus Sept. 23–24, kicked off with celebrated statistician Nate Silver. Silver founded and built FiveThirtyEight, a company that uses statistical analysis to provide insights and predictions into politics, elections, science, and sports. Workshops included “Building Championship-Level Teams,” “Roundtables for Student Networking,” “Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) In-Progress,” and “Leadership Revolution.”
In introducing Silver, who joined the conference virtually, Kirk Goldsberry, executive director of the Business of Sports Institute, said: “What a lot of people in the audience might not know, Nate, is that you actually got your start as a sports analyst nerd, and your first real contribution to internet discourse was baseball predictions and baseball modeling and the PECOTA system.” Silver created PECOTA — the Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm system — to predict player performance, winners, and losers.
Silver said the reason for “a lot of things I’ve tried to create is because there aren’t the alternatives in the market, and I’m kind of curious, more for myself.”
In making decisions about where to focus his energy, Silver said he would ask himself, “Does it have potential as a business opportunity?”
That question, along with his “obsession for baseball statistics, playing fantasy baseball games, and various types of video games” as a kid led him to create PECOTA. The enterprise wasn’t as profitable as he had hoped, but he used those skills to create FiveThirtyEight.
Other big names at the summit included Scott Bonneau, vice president of global talent attraction for Indeed; R.C. Buford, CEO of the San Antonio Spurs and president of sports franchises for Spurs Sports and Entertainment; Becky Hammon, assistant coach of the San Antonio Spurs; Arin Dunn, director of student-athlete development for UT; Adan Hernandez, management consulting executive for Accenture; and Chris Plonsky, chief of staff and executive senior associate director of UT Athletics.
Sponsored by the San Antonio Spurs, Houston Texans, and other sports organizations, the symposium represented one of the three legs that make up McCombs’ new institute: holding events that expose students to industry leaders and influencers. The two others are a curriculum in which students from across disciplines can earn a minor in the Analytics and Business of Sports; and a research enterprise that incorporates statistics, analytics, modeling, and data to generate new products aimed at helping professional sports organizations improve their talent, merchandising, marketing, and entertainment enterprises.
Globally, the sports analytics market size is expected to reach $4.6 billion by 2025, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of more than 30%, according to Forbes. Its reach, however, transcends the sports and entertainment industries, said Ethan Burris, director of McCombs’ Center for Leadership and Ethics.
“Sports analytics and sports business,” have “many parallels with other disciplines in other realms,” Burris said at the summit, noting how Silver started with baseball statistics and segued into politics.
