Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Bills hire architect of new analytics department

BY NICK ST. DENIS

The Buffalo Bills have taken the first step in building a much-anticipated branch of their organization.

Wednesday, the team announced the hiring of Mike Lyons, a 25-year Xerox employee and MIT and University of Rochester Simon School of Business graduate, as their Director of Analytics.

Lyons will be work alongside everyone from coach Doug Marrone to the highest members of the front office to build and lead the Bills' new analytics department.

“It’s another layer of information,” Bills CEO Russ Brandon said, via BuffaloBills.com. “Really it is just another spoke in the wheel of providing as much quality in depth information we can to make informed decisions across all of our business platforms.

"The main focus will be football at this point and we’ll layer that in as we move forward. The whole concept will be bringing the analytics element to everything that we do.”

Brandon said the heavily thought out hiring of Lyons, which is the latest move in a year-long organizational overhaul, will result in a "long range" partnership, but Lyons will dive right in with a number of tasks.

"We have a long list of things for Mike to start working on," Brandon said.

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