As sports hang in the balance of the coronavirus pandemic, one analytics company is working to help the professional football season kick off — by arming its union with data.
Washington, D.C.-based data firm Edgeworth Analytics built and runs an interactive dashboard for the National Football League Players Association that tracks Covid-19 cases in the league’s markets, including Cincinnati. It shows how NFL cities stack up nationally, with separate pages for each team, and lives on the organization’s website. The goal, according to the company, is to track the virus’ spread to show teams which areas pose the highest risk, and help inform decisions going forward.
With the NFL season set to start Thursday, college campuses reopening and other events that can spur outbreaks, it’s “a very dynamic situation,” said John Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Edgeworth. “So part of what we’re really excited about with this project is it just gives us a chance to use our skills, provide some really good information and synthesize data in a really simple way.”
The dashboard, which Edgeworth updates weekly, maps each franchise’s metro area and graphs trends based on cumulative and new cases, Covid-related deaths and other metrics across counties, states and the country. The data come from Johns Hopkins University’s Covid-19 dashboard, which pulls data from Johns Hopkins, the American Red Cross, the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“We launched this dashboard to be transparent with our members about the risk of Covid-19 in their communities and in playing football,” NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith said in an August statement. “Not only will it play a critical role in keeping our players informed, but it will guide our decision-making as the 2020-2021 season approaches.”
Edgeworth Analytics launched about a year ago as a sister business to Edgeworth Economics, a decade-old litigation consulting firm whose work with the District-based NFLPA dates back to a 2010 labor dispute. When the pandemic hit, Edgeworth Analytics pivoted from educating companies more generally on how to use data during legal proceedings to providing Covid-specific data to organizations. And the NFLPA needed a way to get information to its players while coming up with a game plan for its season.
“So the idea came about that we could help,” Johnson said. “We could actually use all of this Covid data we had been collecting, and use our analytics skills to build them an interface where their players and the general public could go, NFL city by NFL city, and see what was going on with case counts.”
Edgeworth Economics’ expansion into data analytics “struck me as a good way to diversify the company,” Johnson said, “where we could take the same data skills or rigor and ability to explain things simply that we do with litigation in the courtroom, and apply it outside the courtroom.”
The work has already expanded beyond the stadium. The company has teamed up with the American Association of Clinical Chemistry to survey U.S. labs about their supply inventory for Covid-19 testing. It’s also initiated a series of studies to help companies figure out whether and how to reopen their offices. Johnson hopes the work could eventually benefit small businesses “that maybe traditionally wouldn’t be ready to turn to a consultant, but are looking for some advice,” Johnson said.
Johnson, an economist with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former Georgetown University professor, started Edgeworth Economics in 2009. The company has about 80 employees, five of whom are fully dedicated to the analytics business.
