Brian Batko

viewing video to say, hey, make this call or don't, but he had the flag on him, and then I suppose he would hand it to Raheem Morris, and he would chuck it for the Falcons.

I think Terrell Austin initially had some of those responsibilities when he first came on.

He ascended to defensive coordinator.

I just...

because you don't want anybody to take the blame.

Maybe Tomlin wanted it all to fall on him if something went wrong.

But it speaks to also just the larger idea of Tomlin seemed to like a pretty tight circle, relatively speaking, with his coaching staffs and not have too many cooks in the kitchen, too many voices.

But the NFL is changing.

There's a lot more information out there for these people to process and analyze and

Yeah, it's never the be all end all.

I mean, look at the Vikings GM who just got fired.

He was kind of the poster child for,

Yeah.

Right.

Well, I think the people who sort of keep track of those dedicated staffers over the years have found that the Steelers are pretty much at the bottom of the league in terms of quantifying it, resources devoted to it.

I did a story on this probably three or four years ago and talked to some people in that sports analytics, NFL analytics community who made a few points.

One, you've got one of the leading places in this right in your backyard in Carnegie Mellon.

They churn out people like that.

year after year who are winning the NFL data science competitions and things of that nature but also Mike Tomlin had a guy like that on his staff uh Karim Kassam was his name and that was I think the person who was credited with his sort of cutting edge move of let's go for two more often and early in games and try to get a competitive edge that way if the numbers make sense and then they sort of got away from that over the years but um

People's mileage will vary on how much that can help you.