This is the second part of a series on the Cowboys’ analytics department, consisting of inside information from a variety of current and former Cowboys employees. In case you missed the first part, you can find that here.
When the Cowboys hired Mike McCarthy, they made a commitment to investing in football analytics again, but that was not their first dalliance with the stuff. As we know, McCarthy arrived in Dallas with an analytics czar already in place: Tom Robinson. The plan was to keep Robinson in that role and expand his department according to McCarthy’s proposals. As it turned out, though, things did not go according to plan.
Any understanding of what happened next has to first begin with Robinson’s path to the Cowboys. Robinson graduated from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, majoring in management information systems. From there, Robinson worked on a masters in predictive analytics at Northwestern before getting a job as a data consultant for Hitachi, a multinational conglomerate that spans a very wide array of industries.
Robinson worked there for about a decade before the Cowboys hired him to be their Data Services Manager. He joined the team shortly after the 2010 draft, and his first season with the team also saw Wade Phillips get fired eight games in and replaced by Jason Garrett.
Robinson’s hire represented a crucial juncture for the team. At the time, football analytics was only recently starting to become common, and even then it was a taboo topic in some ways. Teams like the Packers – who, as we detailed in the first part of this series, had an analytics arm that assisted the coaching staff – had been enjoying success at a high level and other teams were trying to figure out their secrets.
Two years later, Robinson was promoted to the team’s Director of Technology. Two years after that, he was the Director of Football Research. While the word “analytics” was still considered to have too much stigma for an official job title, Robinson was now the head of the Cowboys’ budding analytics department.
By the time Robinson rose to this level, he was one of a handful of such individuals across the league. Pro Football Focus had just been acquired by Cris Collinsworth, and the company was just three years into its work providing analytics insights to a few NFL teams. Robinson was now the man in charge of the analytics department for the most valuable franchise in all of sports, and there was hardly a model for what that looked like yet. But the Cowboys knew they wanted to be ahead of the curve.
After Robinson’s rapid rise through the organization, the Cowboys found themselves at a pivotal stage on the football field as well. Jason Garrett had been the head coach for three full seasons already, finishing each year 8-8 and missing the playoffs. A poorly received draft class in 2013 had led to Will McClay’s ascension from the role that Robinson now filled, and McClay himself was a believer in the emerging science of football analytics. Robinson immediately became someone McClay relied on when sorting data for draft reports and pro personnel acquisitions, but there was a desire to get Robinson’s insights onto the football field as well.
That’s where the strife began, according to several people that were in the organization at the time. Garrett, who had been the backup quarterback for the Cowboys during the 90’s, firmly believed in returning the team to that style of football. This meant a slow, methodical offense that ate up the clock, which kept the defense rested for when they needed to take the field. As one former scout said, “Jason wanted to win every game 17-3.”
As Robinson became more involved with the whole of the organization, and undertook more analytical projects on the most efficient ways to play the sport, the data began to strongly suggest that Garrett’s approach wasn’t the best way to do things. Throwing the ball more, scoring more points, and being more aggressive on fourth downs was where the numbers pointed, but Garrett – along with most head coaches in the league at the time – viewed that as crazy and needlessly risky.
Still, Garrett was not diametrically opposed to taking feedback from Robinson. Adam Vonder Haar, who worked alongside Robinson from 2019 to 2022 as a Football Research Analyst and now serves as the Director of Football Analytics at Sumer Sports, opened up about how receptive Garrett was to the analytical work he and Robinson would present:
“I think it depended on what it was. You know, if I’m telling Jason Garrett what kind of plays he should be calling as ‘the nerd guy’ why would he listen to me anyway? So, like, that’s part of it, but I know for a fact that there were studies that we did where he would come to us and say ‘Hey, I’m trying to decide how we should go about this.’ I know one, just for example, was fourth and 1. He was like ‘Should we be handing it off to Zeke or should Dak be sneaking it?’ That was like a whole study we did, and he took that to heart. So we gave him this whole report on that and, I think the next game, Dak had like two or three QB sneaks and they all converted.
So, he was very much receptive to stuff, it just depended on what it was. I think the fourth down stuff, maybe less so. I think he might view that differently now because I think fourth down decisions were still coming into being with coaches wanting to follow that. So it just kind of depended, but he certainly would value pieces of it.”
Eventually, the Cowboys moved on from Garrett and hired Mike McCarthy. As we detailed in the first part, McCarthy came in with a very specific plan for a robust analytics department, and this was one of several selling points for Jerry Jones. The sudden onset of the pandemic halted those hiring efforts, but McCarthy already had an analytics department that consisted of Robinson, Vonder Haar, and Alok Pattani, a data science developer at Google who does consulting work for the team.
Vonder Haar described McCarthy’s hire as:
“really exciting because it was, like, everyone was kind of starting fresh. There were definitely some [data] reports [left over] from the Garrett era, and there were coaches that were still around, but they came in with a big wishlist of stuff. Which was exciting for us because it’s like ‘Okay, cool, let’s start doing this stuff.’”
Despite the excitement, McCarthy’s first season in Dallas went poorly, though injuries played a large role in that. Once the season concluded, attention once again shifted to the proposition of expanding the analytics department. But while changes to the coaching staff were made, an expansion in the analytics department never happened. It’s unclear whether or not the team made actual attempts to hire others into the department under Robinson, but the stagnation served as an early point of contention for McCarthy.
According to a current football operations staffer in the organization, the Cowboys had earned a negative reputation for their analytics department. Garrett was seen as a coach who only wanted reports that backed up his preconceived notions, and the size of the department remained steady even as other teams rapidly expanded. Robinson and Vonder Haar were frequently tasked with generating reports or studies and then later given other, more time-sensitive tasks that kept them from ever finishing what they had started on. Overall, there was plenty of disorganization in the department, as described by someone in the scouting department:
“You won’t meet a single soul who doesn’t think Tommy [Robinson] is a genius. He gets this stuff like nobody else. But not everyone is cut out to be a leader. Like, we’ve had a few scouts come through here that are great talent evaluators, but they never get a scouting coordinator job. Or they do and they end up getting fired. Because it’s one thing to scout and a whole other thing to coordinate other scouts. I think Tommy is one of the best analytics guys out there, but he didn’t have the organization skills to hack it.”
Vonder Haar refutes this detail about Robinson, though does admit that there were times when the work volume was too high:
“I’m super close to Tom, still am. He was amazing for me, and… he would interface more with coaches and scouting and get the direction for the department, and we would divide up what needed to be done from there.
… There was lots to do. I think we always would’ve liked to have some more people. The most urgent things always had our attention, and the things that weren’t [as urgent] sometimes didn’t get done. At least as far as I knew, I thought the organization, at the time, felt okay with that trade-off… I thought they felt like ‘we’re getting what we need from that department with the two of y’all, even if some things are falling behind.’”
Fair or not, Robinson’s analytics department became difficult to recruit for. The perception from the outside was that it was a high pressure situation with little pay-off, and that led to a decline in interest for other analytics staffers to come to Dallas. Inside the building, there was a growing belief that the lack of organization and consistency from the department was the missing piece to McCarthy’s overarching football plan, and often resulted in the team lacking key parts in the preparation phase for some games.
While the team had once felt okay with the trade-off Vonder Haar mentioned, things changed with McCarthy’s heavier lean on his analytics department. And with that change came the decision to part ways with Robinson shortly after the 2022 season concluded. Like most of these decisions in the NFL, it was a sensitive parting of ways that wasn’t all that amicable, especially given some of the assumptions that were levied against Robinson. That said, even Robinson’s harshest critics during his time in Dallas insist that he’s a good person with a bright future.
Regardless of how things went down with that split, though, the Cowboys found themselves looking to hire a new head of their analytics department and, with it, an aggressive expansion of a department that had remained dormant for far too long.
Tom Robinson was contacted for this article series, but declined to comment.