Note: This piece was written with Noah Davis, and stemmed from a survey we put together roughly a year ago. 

In the past decade, sports analytics moved from the fringes of popular consciousness to the mainstream. The typical media narrative tells us that data ischangingthegame. To some extent, that’s true. The majority of professional teams in the five major sports leagues have at least one person on staff or on retainer tasked with delving into details and applying numbers to performance, and nearly all NBA, NHL and MLB franchises have sent at least one representative to the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

Noah and I wanted to find out more details about the job, the lifestyle and how analytics are being used, so we developed an informal survey and asked people who work or had worked on the sports analytics staffs of professional teams to participate.