In today’s hyper-competitive college sports landscape, the ability to identify undervalued talent early and avoid recruiting “busts” can mean the difference between winning championships and falling behind. Finding the right athletes at the right time allows your program to maximize the talent on your rosters and achieve sustainable success. Doing so was already difficult – and it’s only getting harder. 

In the new cap management era, you’re making high-stakes offers, allocating budgets, and trying to get the most out of your spend. With tens of thousands of athletes across the transfer portal, it’s become extraordinarily challenging to quickly and accurately assess which players fit your needs.

The Big Data Paradox

There’s never been more data available to help you make decisions that improve your roster. Play-by-play data replaced rudimentary box scores and is what most college football programs use today. More recently, the advent of video-based player tracking technology exploded the volume of data by 1000x. This is where pro teams focus their analytic investments because they realize it’s the newest and richest source of data that gives them a competitive advantage.

Unlike professional teams, most collegiate programs lack established in-house R&D teams to effectively process this volume of data and derive actionable insights. Even for well-funded programs, building a world-class analytics team isn’t practical from a cost or time-to-value perspective. 

“Building the infrastructure to host and run data models is a year of an experienced engineer’s time. After that, each individual metric can take 4-12 months or more, depending on complexity. Analysts and engineers working for teams don’t get this type of uninterrupted time to work on long-term projects. It ends up taking them twice as long, and makes it impossible to stay ahead of the curve and generate consistent competitive advantage.”   
– Karim Kassam, VP, Product at Teamworks

To stay competitive and build championship-caliber teams, innovative and data-driven athletic departments are looking to adopt proven advanced analytics solutions to efficiently assess vast amounts of player data, predict future potential, and optimize roster composition.

Teamworks Intelligence: More Hits, Fewer Misses.

Other budgeting or analytics tools on the market summarize a player’s past performance stats and may even give you a way to build simple calculations. But that’s a far cry from the predictive analytics that truly create a competitive advantage. 

Teamworks Intelligence, formerly Zelus Analytics, is the leading solution if you’re looking to incorporate high-quality, reliable analytics into recruiting and budgeting decisions. Trusted by the most respected pro sports organizations around the world, Intelligence uses advanced machine learning and predictive models to unlock data-driven insights within Teamworks Personnel. Recruiters and coaches love Intelligence’s metrics because they quantify the traits they naturally look for when evaluating talent. 

Teamworks Intelligence delivers position-specific metrics that are leading indicators of future potential, helping you identify talent early and maximize the value of your roster. Using the full power of player-tracking data, our models factor in critical context to enhance accuracy and enable deeper, more meaningful evaluations. 

For example, when assessing the accuracy of a QB, traditional stats provide Completion %. Yet every scout and coach knows that not all completions are equal. Intelligence takes into account the difficulty of the throw, the separation between defender and receiver and between receiver and sideline, and more than a dozen other factors. 

By delivering highly accurate position-specific metrics, you can quickly identify and evaluate players based on your scheme, playing style, and roster needs. Intelligence’s metrics help personnel and coaching staff have conversations about players that are richer, more informed, and more productive.   

Partner with the Best 

The leadership team behind Intelligence is recognized around the globe as having defined the sports analytics industry over the last decade. Together with the 70+ staff and 20+ PhDs surrounding them at Teamworks, we’ve built Intelligence platforms used by all major professional sports, including the MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, and European soccer. Now, we’re bringing this same level of power and sophistication to the collegiate market.  

“Because we’ve led over a dozen R&D teams and have over a century of team-side experience, we deeply understand the challenges our customers face. Now, we’ve built the tools we wished we’d had. This combination of experience and technical expertise makes us a unique partner for college athletic programs.”
– Karim Kassam, VP, Product at Teamworks

In an era where maximizing roster value is a necessity, not a luxury, the recruiting process demands more than surface-level insights—it requires a deep, data-driven approach that uncovers hidden potential and mitigates risk. 

Teamworks Intelligence delivers exactly that, offering college athletic programs a competitive edge with advanced predictive analytics and position-specific metrics that go beyond traditional play-by-play data. With over a decade of experience leading R&D teams and a world-class roster of experts, Teamworks is uniquely positioned to empower your program with insights that were once only available to the pros. 

Stay tuned for more news and updates on Teamworks Intelligence and other innovations – all aimed at helping you build a championship-caliber roster.