Neil Hornsby and the football hiding in plain sight

Neil Hornsby had a rather inconvenient hobby. He wanted to know how everyone on a football field had played. The quarterback was easy enough to discuss. So was the receiver holding the ball. But what about the guard who made the throw possible, or the defender who did his job without arriving anywhere near the television replay? There were twenty-two people at work. The conversation kept returning to a handful.

From England, Hornsby began taking that imbalance seriously. He was a business consultant who loved American football, surrounded by friends more inclined to discuss soccer. A website offered somewhere to have the conversation he wanted. Before it became a company selling information to NFL clubs, Pro Football Focus was an enthusiast finding other enthusiasts. The commercial proposition arrived considerably later than the enthusiasm.

His question was simple enough to sound faintly rude. When a commentator called someone a fine player, how could you check? Sam Monson, an early PFF analyst, later described that question as the reason for the site. Reputation supplied an answer before the work had been examined. Hornsby wanted to examine the work. This was an awkward way to enjoy a Sunday, and an interesting way to begin a business.

A television habit, then a mountain of tape

The attraction began around 1983, while Hornsby was at university in Liverpool. Channel 4 carried NFL highlights on Sunday nights, a week behind the games themselves. Dan Marino was a rookie. His passing drew Hornsby into a sport whose mixture of elegance and aggression appealed to him. Waiting a week for highlights seems almost pastoral now. It also left plenty of time to wonder what the highlights had omitted.

Reading deepened the attachment. Paul Zimmerman, the football writer known as Dr. Z, became an intellectual influence through A Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football. Hornsby admired the willingness to challenge a familiar verdict when close observation supported a different one. A celebrated player could disappoint; an obscure player could deserve recognition. Fame did not get to fill in the grading sheet.

Hornsby eventually tried to assess every player on every play. By 2006, when PFF began growing, he understood the task required more people. That realization matters to the story: the method demanded a group before the business could afford one. Football furnished the material, but organization would determine whether the material ever became useful.

The customer who already had a football team

For years, Hornsby kept individual statistics in Microsoft Access. In 2006 he and friends began putting their work online. The audience was small enough to make a busy week look absurd: he recalled eighty-hour working weeks and roughly fifteen daily visitors. Even allowing for the satisfactions of a hobby, that is a demanding exchange rate.

Then, in 2009, Jon Berger of the New York Giants asked for customized information about upcoming opponents. An NFL club was interested in work being assembled by people outside the league. Hornsby’s surprise was understandable. Surely a professional team already possessed what a group of dedicated fans had been collecting? The enquiry revealed that access to the sport and access to organized information about the sport were separate advantages.

PFF continued supplying the Giants during the season that ended with their Super Bowl victory over New England. Word of the relationship spread, and more clubs bought specialized data. A hobby now had a buyer with exacting requirements. The interesting discovery was less glamorous than a prediction engine: careful, repeated observation could be valuable to people whose livelihoods depended on football.

The bill for watching everything

An early PFF interview captures the financial reality with more candour than polish. In August 2010, Hornsby explained that the site needed subscriptions to survive. Accurate analysis required trained people working full time. He had been paying them himself. The work might have been motivated by enjoyment; the analysts still needed to eat.

There was a second problem. The group had been so occupied watching games that it struggled to write about what it found. More contributors would free time for articles, game reports and discussion. Fantasy players were already using the statistics, yet Hornsby admitted the core group did not play fantasy football. PFF brought in people who understood that audience. It is a useful little portrait of a founder recognizing the limits of his own expertise.

His humour survived the arithmetic. In the same conversation, he jokingly placed himself on a supermarket checkout during the offseason, then withdrew the claim. His actual day job was consultancy. By the following interview, he described a calendar divided between consulting from January through August and football from September through December. The hobby had acquired office hours, though rather extravagant ones.

An accent at the other end of the line

In 2012, Hornsby left his consultancy and accepted an eighty per cent pay cut to concentrate on PFF. Two years later, Cris Collinsworth bought a majority stake. Hornsby moved to Cincinnati with his family in October 2014. A British football conversation now had an American address.

Collinsworth’s involvement supplied an unusually direct test of the work. Before investing, the former NFL receiver and broadcaster compared PFF’s assessment of a game with his own. Their conclusions were close. The British accent had initially made him wonder whether somebody was playing a joke. The analysis made a more persuasive introduction.

At the time of the 2014 deal, PFF had thirteen NFL clubs as customers and eight full-time staff. The partnership helped extend its work into college football. Later conference biographies described a business serving all thirty-two NFL teams, with Hornsby as chief operating officer. The audience that once looked comically small had become a customer list covering the league.

What a grade can reasonably claim

PFF’s appeal depended on looking beyond the obvious event. A pass play could include timing the quarterback’s release, identifying the players on the field and recording what happened away from the ball. Offensive linemen, frequently absent from conventional statistical discussion, became visible in the record. The resulting information gave a fan or coach more ways to inspect a performance.

Hornsby was candid about the limits. Asked in 2010 about the dependability of the grading, he began by acknowledging imperfection. His example concerned a well-thrown pass that a receiver mishandled into an interception. A basic record charged the quarterback with the turnover. A closer assessment could distinguish the throw from the receiver’s error. The outcome remained real; responsibility required another look.

That preference appeared in his own football judgments. Asked to choose an all-time player in August 2010, he was reluctant to rank people he knew only through highlights. He chose Walter Payton, pointing particularly to blocking as well as running, receiving and longevity. His suggested viewing was an entire game. The celebrated runs were available to everyone. Hornsby wanted you to watch what Payton did between them.

A founder learns to leave room

The operating problem changed as PFF grew. In a 2020 interview, Hornsby described early colleagues who had joined because they understood football and subsequently had to learn how to manage. Recruiting people into an established culture brought its own mistakes. Affection for a sport could get people through the door; it could not supply every skill a company needed.

He favoured tools that reused the underlying data across customers. His concise formulation was “Build once, sell many times.” A product for one professional team could be adapted for other teams, colleges and consumers. The principle fitted a business whose raw material was expensive human attention. Once somebody had watched and recorded a play, the observation should be able to do more than one job.

There was a personal side to those professional connections, too. In his tribute to coach Gunther Cunningham, Hornsby recalled a visit to his family’s home before a Cincinnati meeting. Cunningham was a gracious guest, interested in their lives and happy to talk about subjects beyond football. Hornsby remembered the person away from the sideline. Even a business devoted to grading performances leaves room for things that do not belong in a spreadsheet.

“Build once, sell many times.”Neil Hornsby, 2020

Another game with work outside the spotlight

Hornsby eventually left PFF; his departure was publicly reported in August 2022. His subsequent professional profile lists MatchSense, a rugby analytics company founded in 2023. He is now its CEO. The sport has changed, while the preoccupation is recognizable: examine the individual work inside a collective result.

MatchSense describes a service covering scrums, lineouts, rucks, passing, tackles and kicks, with observations connected to video. Its player-interaction grades use a one-to-five scale. A lineout can be examined through the timing and stability of a lift; a scrum through binding and angles. Those are the sorts of details a spectator can watch without necessarily recording, comparing or retrieving them.

The company pitches its work to analysts, coaches and executives, emphasizing quality checks and reports that help staff act on what they see. Its website explicitly draws on the team’s PFF experience. That is a continuation of Hornsby’s original commercial discovery: detailed observation becomes more useful when someone organizes it around another person’s working day.

There is something appealingly excessive about the starting impulse. Most fans finish watching a game and begin arguing. Hornsby helped build a way to go back through it, player by player, before reaching a verdict. The argument could still happen, of course. It would simply have rather more homework attached. For the guard whose useful afternoon never made the replay, that seems a fair arrangement.