Impact Players

When seven students from the Department of Sport Analytics in the David B. Falk College of Sport at Syracuse University started working for the United Football League (UFL) this past winter, league officials explained the kind of data they had available and asked the students to pitch their ideas on how to use it.

One dataset tracked quarterback completion probability, and two students, Austin Ambler and Danny Baris, pitched a metric to quantify quarterback decision-making. They call it a “QB Decision Score,” and Ambler says it determines if a quarterback made the right passing decision based on the predicted EPA (Expected Points Added) of each receiver on the play.

The UFL officials overseeing the sport analytics students – Operations Manager Bryan Kilmeade, Senior Vice President of Technology Scott Harniman, and Vice President of Football Technology Brad Campbell – wondered if such a model was possible, but gave Ambler and Baris the go-ahead to try.

“A week later they came back and gave us a first run-through, and we were like, wow, this is impressive,” Kilmeade says. “In our minds this was going to take the whole season. It took a week.”

Throughout the 2025 UFL season, which ran from March 28 through the championship game on June 14, the seven sport analytics majors – Ambler, Baris, Toby Halpern, and Zach Seidel (who are all on schedule to graduate this December), Nolan Bruton ’26, Eleanor O'Connor ’27, and Johann Perera ’25 – worked on several significant projects for the league.

In fact, many of their data analysis models were elevated to the teams and their coaches during the season, and they may eventually find their way to the NFL, which has a strong relationship with the UFL, and the leagues often discuss rules innovation, technology, and player development.

“This partnership (with the Falk College of Sport) has exceeded our expectations on the league side, and we’re looking forward to continuing it with as many students who want to do it,” Kilmeade says. “The students have impressed everybody we’ve gotten them in front of.”

Invaluable Experience

Kilmeade ’18 was a sport management major in Falk College when the sport analytics program started in 2017. He earned a minor in sport analytics, where Department of Sport Analytics Chair Rodney Paul was one of his professors and current Director of Corporate Partnerships and External Engagement Francesco Riverso was his advisor.

He stayed connected with Paul and Riverso throughout his early professional career with the XFL and USFL, which merged to form the UFL. When he was with the XFL, he reached out to Falk College and its Football Analytics Club about data regarding kickoffs. The students in the club charted games and their analysis led to the new kickoff rule that was first used in the XFL and adopted by the NFL before the 2024 season.

At the UFL, the league has the same issue: Lots of data, but a small staff that can’t possibly get to it all. So, Kilmeade reached out to Paul and Riverso again and it was a natural fit as UFL President and CEO Russ Brandon is a member of the Falk College of Sport Advisory Board, and former Syracuse University football star Daryl Johnston is the UFL’s executive vice president of football operations.

The partnership between the UFL and the Sport Analytics program marked the first time an American college or university has worked with the nation’s premier spring football league.

“Innovation is at the heart of the UFL, so it is only fitting that we seek out the creativity and the expertise of these students as we look toward a new approach to sport analytics,” Brandon said when the partnership was announced in March.

Paul says the experience the students gained from working with the UFL was “impossible to replicate in the classroom” as the league and students held regular meetings to discuss their projects, shared findings through visualization (charts, graphs, dashboards), and strategized on next steps.

“The main thing I got from working with the UFL was more experience working with data,” says Baris, who majors in sport analytics and statistics. “I also was able to experiment with a few types of models that I had not worked with previously, and I gained experience presenting work to people with a less analytical background.”

Game Changers

As Kilmeade says, the students hit the ground running . . . and throwing . . . and kicking. In addition to the “QB Decision Score,” here are other examples of their work with the UFL:

• PAT Decision Chart: For the point after touchdown conversion, the UFL awards one point if successful from the 2-yard line, two points from the 5-yard-line, and three points from the 10-yard line. Students produced data designed to help teams decide their conversion choice based on the score and other game situations, and additional analysis explored whether those yard lines should be moved next season.
• Onside Kick Alternative: Instead of an onside kick used in the NFL, UFL coaches can choose a fourth-and-12 scrimmage play from the kicking team’s own 28-yard line as an option to retain possession after a score. The students analyzed the impact of that rule, and their conclusions from the PAT and onside kick analysis were sent to the league’s coaches during the season.

“The league would like to share our work with broadcasters and teams, and it could inform possible rule changes going into next year,” says Baris, who plans to start a master’s program in applied data science upon graduation in December.

• Game Timing: TV networks FOX and ESPN are part owners of the UFL, and naturally they want exciting games with a lot of points. But when there are a lot of scores, the games are stopped more frequently, and the networks also want the games to fit in a three-hour window.

Using in-game data, the students created a prediction model for the average time of a game based on how many points were scored and other factors such as incomplete passes, which stop the game clock. The model is still being refined, but Kilmeade says FOX’s lead producer for UFL games was very interested in using it to track the predicted length of a game in real time.

“The league wanted to know what they could do to reduce game times, so we made a model to predict what the time of a game would be based on various factors,” says Ambler, a sport analytics major with minors in business, economics, and sport management. “This has been sent to the league’s broadcast partners for them to use.”

Ambler, Baris, Bruton, Halpern, and Seidel were available to travel to St. Louis for the UFL’s championship weekend in mid-June. There, they capped their internship experience by staffing the Fan Fest Sportable booth, where fans used the Sportable tracking device to measure their throwing skills, and the Tech Suite, where they displayed their work from the season. Kilmeade says film producer and UFL co-owner Dany Garcia was one of the many dignitaries who were impressed by the students’ presentation.

“I was able to do projects with real-world data that were actually used/implemented by the league, and grow my technical skills and abilities by having to learn new techniques in order to accomplish some of the projects,” Ambler says. “These new skills that I learned will be able to be applied to other projects in my future roles throughout my professional career.”

Visit the Falk College website to learn more about academic programs, internship opportunities, and career paths in the nation’s only college at a high-research university to focus solely on sport-related disciplines.