Kwesi Adofo-Mensah played basketball at Princeton and was a commodities broker before pivoting his professional career to the NFL. The Browns new VP of Football Operations was hired by GM Andrew Berry, another Ivy League grad, and joins Paul DePodesta — one of the godfathers of the numbers-driven models in baseball — in running the Cleveland football franchise.
Naturally, the term analytics is going to come up quite a bit. Yet in his press conference during the week, Adofo-Mensah downplayed the notion.
Adofo-Mensah was asked about the different connotations, both good and bad, associated with the word “analytics”. In his answer, the young VP explained the brain trust’s decision-making process and how that relates to the vague term.
“It is so funny, before I came into the NFL, I never heard that word and never used that word, and now that I am in the NFL, I still do not,” Adofo-Mensah told reporters via Zoom. “At the end of the day, we are trying to make good decisions. These are uncertain things that we are trying to figure out so we try to be evidence-based, I would more say. Look, coaches and scouts have been evidence-based in the NFL for a long time. Every quality control coach is evidence-based. They come up with a probability. I do not necessarily think that this is some new thing. I think we are just applying it, using different methods and also using it across football operations.”
Adofo-Mensah then explained how they use their process to make decisions.
“We are trying to win on the margins and so we are trying extricate every little winning possible advantage we can find across football operations and use the evidence to support that. I think that (coach Stefanski) Kevin, AB, DePodesta and everybody in this organization are aligned in that sense. I do not think we believe it is more than it is and I do not think we believe that is less than it is. I think we just believe that it is an important facet and something that can help us, and we are going to use whatever to help us.”
Adofo-Mensah comes from a similar approach used in San Francisco, a process that led the 49ers to the Super Bowl.