At this year’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Karim Kassam, VP of Product for Football and Hockey at Teamworks Intelligence, delivered a compelling presentation on the future of college football analytics to a standing-room only. Kassam highlighted how college programs have fallen behind NFL counterparts in player evaluation and outlined a compressed timeline for catching up.

The talk showcased proprietary metrics like “Change of Direction” (CoD) that are changing talent evaluation for the better, using Puka Nacua as a case study to illustrate how tracking-based analytics reveal athletic traits that traditional combine metrics miss. Kassam contrasted the limitations of the 3-cone drill with more sophisticated CoD measurements.

Kassam concluded by exploring how advanced mathematical techniques, particularly graph neural networks, will transform team performance analysis through metrics like “Team Run” that attribute value to every player’s contribution on running plays—revealing insights that conventional statistics overlook and creating a more complete evaluation framework.

Watch the full presentation below.