Sloan conference preview: Rise of college GMs, AI's impact and are nerds ruining basketball?
This Friday in Boston, more than 2,500 sports-industry leaders, practitioners and students will convene for the 19th annual Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
Once endearingly dubbed 'Dorkapalooza' by Bill Simmons, the conference has established itself as one of the most interesting sports business events of the year.
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Co-founded in 2006 by Kraft Analytics Group CEO Jessica Gelman and Philadelphia 76ers president of basketball operations Daryl Morey and perennially managed by MBA students at MIT's Sloan School of Management, SSAC is known for its lively panel discussions, thought-provoking research competitions and jostling hallway networking, which ranges from top executives pitching ideas to each other to ambitious MBA students hustling those same execs for entry-level front-office jobs.
I have participated as a SSAC panel moderator a few times and also attended as a curious fan, but even when I can't go, I pay close attention throughout the weekend to the social media handle (@SloanSportsConf), hashtag (#ssac25) and YouTube page (@42analytics, where you can check out panels from previous years) as a barometer for emerging ideas in sports business and management.
Which panels on this year's agenda have caught my eye?
My connection to Gelman goes back even further than SSAC's launch. Before that, she and I were classmates at Harvard Business School, where the former Harvard basketball player regularly schooled me in the campus gym and intramural hoops league when she wasn't breaking down a case study in the classroom. Since then, she has become one of the leading voices in the sports industry not just for amplifying the application of analytics, but also for developing wider opportunities for women in sports.
I connected with Gelman to get her perspective on the weekend ahead.
(The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
What specific themes or topics have emerged as the most hot-button for the 2025 event?
'Analytics in Motion' is our overarching theme this year, as we are seeing how much analytics is changing the game on the field/court and, simultaneously, how fan consumption and engagement are evolving with streaming, digital and a more connected gameday.
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Those changes are happening across five major areas: globalization, investing, college sports, women's sports and AI. Each of those areas is woven throughout all our discussions with a focus on how analytics is driving and affecting the growth and changes of the sports industry.
This is Year 19 of SSAC, so what has surprised you most about the evolution of the conference over the past decade?
The acceptance of analytics as part of the fabric of sports. Ten years ago, we were still talking about whether analytics mattered, and you may remember Charles Barkley's comments then ('Among other things, I've always believed analytics was crap').
This year's panel, 'Have the Nerds Ruined Basketball?' highlights how accepted analytics is (although not in understanding, application and usage) and the need to be constantly evolving the game and fan experience as the underpinnings and insights change.
So, today, there is acceptance, but from our perspective on the sporting side and especially on the business side, we are still in the very early days of analytics application and usage. Many new sports are starting to use it, especially individual sports and equally, this year, we have a panel highlighting the data accessibility limitations in women's sports.
Significantly, as analytics has gained acceptance these past 10 years, we recognized how we could play a role in highlighting analytics as a growing focus of sports and focused on creating opportunities for historically under-represented populations in sports at SSAC.
This year, we will have our seventh women's luncheon, welcome our fifth mentorship class and continue efforts since inception, including résumé review and career conversations. We have always had a careers-focused element, given that we are a student-run conference, and we love how many alumni are now leaders in the industry.
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These broader efforts over the past decade have a long tail, and we are very proud to see many former mentees getting their break in sports through SSAC. The mentors' willingness and desire to give back highlights how special this sports analytics community is.
Any advice for people who want to follow along but won't be able to be in Boston?
Our roots are focused on education and increasing the adoption of analytics in sports. We live-stream our main panel room at no cost and have done so for more than a decade. As a student-run, non-profit that sprung out of a class, Daryl and I were teaching at MIT Sloan, multiple forms of access is an area we pride ourselves on.
If the collective brainpower of every SSAC attendee could be harnessed to solve one consistently vexing sports-business question, what would you pick?
Your question is specific to the sports business, so that is the focus. College sports are at a crossroads, and the potential impact on Olympic and women's sports is an area we should all be focused on. We are seeing increasing interest and investment in these sports professionally, as they are more readily accessible and available digitally.
As the 'training ground' for athletes (including five percent international) and, more importantly, teaching great skills for life, ensuring continued opportunity and growth for those sports is critical. The impact of college sports participation on future business executives is well-documented: 95 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were collegiate athletes and 94 percent of C-suite women were collegiate athletes, so ideating on this is a collective imperative.
(Photo of Daryl Morey: Tim Nwachukwu / Getty Images)
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