Football heatmap:
visualizing player
performance in any
situation.
Peyton Manning Heat Map
and communicate results, gives Perduco
a competitive advantage in the defense
space. This same advantage can be applied to other business areas such as energy, healthcare and finance. However, a
chance encounter and 30-minute discussion brought a new opportunity – sports
– to the forefront.
I retired from the United States Air
Force in 2011 and partnered with Toyzanne
Mason to form The Perduco Group. My
final assignment in the Air Force was
spent serving on faculty at the Air Force
Institute of Technology (AFIT) at WPAFB.
On a return visit to AFIT in 2012, I stopped in
to visit with Dr. Ken Bauer, professor in the
Department of Operational Sciences at
AFIT. We traded updates, and the topic
turned to sports. Ken mentioned an article
A NA L Y T I C S
he had recently published with Jacob on
predicting NBA outcomes using artificial
neural networks. I knew Jacob from his time
at AFIT and had even helped Jacob find a
job with a defense consulting company (not
Perduco) after graduation. What he did not
know, however, was that Jacob’s article had
just topped 1,000 full downloads from the
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports.
For those not familiar with academic literature, this is an uncommonly high number.
I left AFIT that day knowing two things:
Perduco was going into the sports domain,
and Jacob was the right person to lead
this push.
I first called my business mentor and
vice president for Perduco, Chris Mason, and brought up the idea of expanding Perduco into the sports sector. As a
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