A decade of college football will soon sit inside one searchable system built to help USC turn thousands of plays into clearer game-day decisions.
Students and recent alumni from the analytics master’s program at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering are organizing play-level data from thousands of Football Bowl Subdivision games. Their goal is to create a data warehouse that lets USC Football analysts search years of information without rebuilding datasets for every new question.
“I’m just astounded at the amount of data that’s collected,” said Bruce Wilcox, an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering practice at USC Viterbi. “We hope, by the end of the summer, to have that first data warehouse operating.”
Football produces a dense record of nearly every event on the field. Tackles, touchdowns, formations, penalties and other details can all become data points. The problem is not simply collecting them. Analysts must organize the information before they can use it.
Wilcox assembled the Viterbi team at the beginning of the spring semester. He asked Saloni Deepak Prabhu to lead the project’s daily technical work.
Prabhu earned her master’s degree in chemical engineering from USC in 2025. She met Wilcox after choosing data-focused coursework and later joined his research group and the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering.
The team is building a structured archive known as a data warehouse. The first major section will center on plays. It will contain one row for every play from every game across the past 10 years.
That structure is meant to reduce the time analysts spend cleaning and arranging information before they can study it.
“We are building a data warehouse so the analysts can get direct access to well-modeled structured data, so that they can spend time on their analysis and the time spent on preparing the data is eliminated altogether,” Prabhu said.
Conor McQuiston, USC’s director of football analytics, commissioned the project. He sees the warehouse as a way to give his department more freedom to investigate strategic questions.
College teams have tried many approaches across thousands of games. A well-organized database could let USC compare those choices and treat past games as a broad testing ground.
“So many different teams have tried so many different things that just having access to all this data lets us run natural experiments,” McQuiston said. “What has and hasn’t worked, and what can we learn from that?”
Instead of manually assembling information for each idea, analysts could search the warehouse for relevant plays, seasons or opponents. They could then compare patterns and examine how often certain approaches succeeded.
The team eventually plans to move beyond play-level results. A later phase could connect individual player performance with specific plays and game situations.
The technical challenge came with an unusual complication. Several students working on the project had little experience with American football.
“American football was very new to me,” Prabhu said. “Before joining this project, I researched about how American football works, got to know its rules and some technical stuff, and Conor was a great help also.”
Many students in the analytics program are international students. McQuiston said they quickly learned a sport known for complex rules, specialized positions and changing game situations.
“Many of the students in this program are international students, and while American football is gaining popularity internationally, it’s still not a sport most of them grew up watching,” McQuiston said. “The speed at which the international students were able to learn a sport as complex as American football was really impressive.”
Their limited football background did not change the basic approach to the project. The team still had to understand how the intended users would work with the database.
“We don’t build in isolation,” Prabhu said. “We need to understand the requirements of the ‘business,’ which in this case is football. It is very important for us to understand what all requirements are and what areas of analysis they want.”
That context shapes how the warehouse is organized. A technically complete database would offer little value if analysts could not ask the questions that matter during game preparation.
The project therefore depends on regular communication between the Viterbi team and USC Football’s analytics department. Engineers must understand which details matter, how plays should be categorized and what kinds of comparisons analysts want to make.
Prabhu’s own experience reflects that process. She began by learning the sport’s rules and technical language.
“I am actually a football fan now,” Prabhu said. “I’m learning step by step, but yeah, I am.”
A working data warehouse could give USC Football analysts faster access to a much larger record of college football strategy. That would allow them to spend less time preparing data and more time evaluating patterns, opponents and possible decisions.
The project could also create a stronger base for future analysis. Once the play-level data mart is operating, the team plans to expand toward individual player performance. Linking players with specific plays could give analysts another way to study how game situations develop.
The effort also shows how analytics projects depend on subject knowledge. The Viterbi students could not organize football data effectively without understanding how coaches and analysts might use it.
For USC, the immediate value lies in making years of football information easier to search. The larger opportunity is turning that organized history into questions the team can test before the next game.
The original story “Engineering students build USC Football a smarter play-by-play archive to sharpen game strategy” is published in The Brighter Side of News.
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