
Alumni Chats: John Park
John Park has taken his competitive drive from MATHCOUNTS all the way to the NFL. John works as the Director of Strategic Football Operations for the Dallas Cowboys. He studied cultural anthropology at Duke University and got his M.S. in actuarial science at Columbia University, working as an actuary before beginning his career in football. He also joined the MATHCOUNTS Board this year.
We talked with John about sports analytics, music and the importance of working with a team.
October 2024
How do you use math to transform a team? What makes a winning team?
Many people don't realize that math has been a big component of football for a long time, in terms of breaking down tendencies and taking advantage of team strengths and opponent weaknesses. “Moneyball” branding has become popular as of late, but I would say math and STEM-related concepts have been fully integrated into professional football since its inception.
In terms of what makes a winning team: it's all about alignment. From ownership to the Head Coach to the staff to the players to everyone in the organization, when everyone is aligned anything is possible. I’m grateful to serve alongside good people who are elite at what they do.
I think there’s sometimes a perception that there are sports people and there are math people, but you’re living proof that sports and math overlap a lot more often than some people think. What would you say to someone who thinks they’re just “not a math person” or “not a sports person”?
Football is a beautiful sport because it brings all types of competitive people together to try and do really hard things. There’s diversity in every dimension on a football staff and a football team.
On the quantitative or technical side, it’s critical for all people to be able to think clearly, precisely, and strategically about your work, and that goes for any industry or line of work.
With that said, the line between technical and non-technical professionals are a lot more blurred than people realize. A lot of the top coaches and scouts in the game—head coaches, coordinators, assistant coaches and personnel executives and scouts across the league—are very analytical and technically savvy. It’s also becoming more common to find analysts who have significant levels of previous experience as players, coaches, and scouts. Additionally, football staffs have tapped into the quantitative insights that have surfaced in the public sphere, and that's evidenced both by teams’ applications of these insights and also teams’ outright hiring of these people as consultants and full-time staff.
You said before that math has always been part of football, but sports analytics as a profession is fairly new. When you were hired by the Colts in 2016, you were their first full-time analytics staffer. What are your thoughts on sports executives coming around to analytics as a discipline?
Again, I think there's a lot of quantitative-minded people who've been in the sport since the beginning, and that goes for all sports. It just wasn't branded in that fashion.
With that said, I think in the NFL in particular, the advent of player tracking data has led to a paradigm shift in the size and scale of the data that people are dealing with. It has raised the bar in terms of the technical skill set necessary to take advantage of that type of data.
But again, ultimately, the people who are most effective in these technical roles are the ones who can empathize, communicate and connect with the rest of the building. When technical people can empathize and embody a spirit of collaboration and trust, natural synergies can develop.
You mentioned Moneyball, and the story of the A's has played a big part in popularizing analytics. If you were going to choose a football team or story to be the subject of a movie on football analytics, what story would you choose?
All the teams in the league are doing very creative things. To your specific question, perhaps a Moneyball Part 2 with the Browns could make sense. The character in the movie Peter Brand is partially based on Paul DePodesta who is currently the Chief Strategy Officer for the Cleveland Browns.
Data analytics has spurred so many dramatic changes in sports in just the last 20 years. What do you think is the future of sports analytics?
Currently a lot of good analysis is being done in terms of frame-by-frame analysis with player tracking data. The next level of that, which is happening in a lot of other sports, is using multiple sensors and motion capture technology to capture biomechanical information. Outside of putting sensors on every joint on an athlete’s body, we must rely on generating data passively from film through computer vision-based technologies. While that is easier in baseball because the players are spread out, you start having problems in sports like basketball, soccer, and football because increased occlusion or overlap among players limits what can be captured from film.
While that is probably the next level of what's currently being done, teams are currently still trying to systematically incorporate the insights that can be pulled out of the player tracking data into their standard workflow as it relates to coaching and scouting.

You were a Mathlete when you were a middle school student in New Jersey. Can you tell me about your experience? Do you have any favorite memories?
Early on, I loved solving puzzles. My older brother Alan went through MATHCOUNTS two years before me, so when it was my turn in at Leonia Middle School… it was like “game on.” I was okay at the written part, but the Countdown Round was my thing. The way we did it at our school was cool because they would let the whole school watch the countdown round. Some of my friends who didn’t know that side of me would go nuts in the crowd when they saw me do my thing.
When we went to Princeton for the state competition, I thought I had bombed the written test. Then they announced the Countdown Round students, and I was the last one to get called at tenth place. Again, game on. I got up there and beat everyone in the countdown round and I went to nationals. That was fun.
Do you feel like your experiences with math as a middle schooler played a part in where you've ended up now?
It most certainly did. I ended up going to the county magnet public school (Bergen Academy) that my brother Alan attended because they had recruited me to be on the math team. I’m thankful for the high school I went to because I was surrounded by awesome people and awesome classmates, a path that has led me to this circuitous journey that I've been on ever since.
Many of my life passions and interests have involved math. I was always into music and grew up playing the violin. In addition to playing football and tennis in high school, I was a part of a hip-hop dance group called Gizmo. I continued to dance in college in a group called Defining Movement or DefMo. In parallel, I also spent over a decade of my life heavily invested in my craft as a rapper from high school through graduate school. It's well studied that there's a lot of ties between music and math, and the arts are probably one way that where my quantitative skill set manifested in my life.
I think it's very useful to be able to think clearly about problems, and I have no doubt that my participation in MATHCOUNTS helped sharpen that sword when I was growing up and gave me pride in terms of leaning into that part of my identity.
You studied cultural anthropology as an undergrad student at Duke. What drew you to that field of study? Do you find ways to connect that to your field?
In college, I tried everything under the sun, and I kept switching majors. At different points I must have been pre-med, pre-law, philosophy, computer science, religion… basically anything and everything. Then one time, I remember I was at a campus event, just mingling with the people there, and a professor was like, “Hey man, you should take my Intro to Cultural Anthropology class.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but the following semester I took it, and I loved it.
You know, anthropology is all about the study of what makes humans human. I love learning about people and am intentional about aiming to understand other people’s perspectives. I’ve found that my natural tendency is to be a connector. The one constant through all the different paths I’ve taken so far in life has been wanting to solve hard problems worth solving with good people. Looking back, it makes sense that I became a cultural anthropology major along the way.
You also got your master’s in actuarial science at Columbia and worked in insurance before working in football. What was that like? What prompted you to pivot into sports analytics?
I had friends I grew up with and buddies from college who had become actuaries. They were the ones who suggested I become an actuary to make “good money” while still doing music on nights and weekends. I passed the first two actuarial exams—probability and financial mathematics—and I think anyone who did MATHCOUNTS competitively could pass those once they put in the requisite preparation and effort. After that, entry level recruiters told me that if I was serious about becoming an actuary, I should go to grad school, get an actuarial internship and then try to flip that into an entry level position. Columbia had just started their inaugural actuarial cohort, and they accepted me. I did a couple of internships and ended up at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
After a few years I had become a credentialed Associate of the Society of Actuaries, but by that time I had developed an urge to teach and coach. At the time, I was active coaching men's and women's flag football at church and was helping a professional football team as a remote game charter as well. I proceeded to write an incredibly large number of letters to high schools and colleges in the New York City metropolitan area, with the goal of teaching and coaching high school football in mind. That’s when the head coach at Rutgers responded to a cold email of mine and asked me to come down and talk, and it was one of the best conversations I’ve ever had in my life. Coach Kyle Flood, who is currently the Offensive Coordinator and Offensive Line coach at Texas, gave me my first job in football as an entry level member of his staff. I’m so incredibly grateful to have had that first opportunity to work with great coaches, staff and student athletes who I’m still close with to this day. Over time, my particular skillset allowed me to contribute in specific ways, and that has kind of snowballed into what it is today.
How does your educational background influence your work now in sport strategy?
I’m always striving to work with good people, and I am intentional about prioritizing good communication. I think it behooves people growing up who have a technical skillset to push themselves to be active in the community in terms of just being around people and developing empathy and communication skills. In practical terms, when called upon, you could have the best idea in the world, but it’s useless if you can’t explain it and get another person to understand what you’re saying.
And then from the technical side, I’ve hired three analysts (Sarah Mallepalle, William Britt and Bryant Davis), an engineer (Max Lyons) and we also have two fellows on board (Piper Hampsch and Shane Hauck). They are all a lot smarter than I am and better people. I’m grateful for them all. I see my main responsibility as a facilitator of dialogue and connector of ideas and workflows; in short, I’m a fullback here to remove impediments to our productivity. Any research, any process, any system we build must make sense within the context of what we are doing as an organization.
Do you have any general advice for Mathletes, especially ones that might be interested in pursuing a career like yours?
I would say if you’re involved in sports and this is a space you're interested in, you should try and think through how you can think strategically about the game, because whatever level that takes you to—little league, high school, college, professional, etc.—that could help you as an athlete or as a sports professional when your playing days are over.
If you're not involved in a sport, I would just encourage you to get involved. It’s good to be around people and try to do things in a team context, because doing things in team settings is extremely hard, necessary and meaningful work. If you can navigate personalities, perspectives and intentions in team settings, you’ll be ready to handle most situations that you will encounter not just at work but in life.
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