Kyle Cunningham-Rhoads ’12 applies I.S.-inspired curiosity as sports analyst

Kyle Cunningham-Rhoads ’12 grew up fascinated with all things baseball, including collecting baseball cards and absorbing the player statistics on the back. Little did he know that his love of baseball would set the course for his decision to major in mathematics and play on the Fighting Scots baseball team at The College of Wooster and for his career path as an AI data analyst at Stats Perform.

His college choice was easy. His grandparents, Fred ’59 and Jo ’58 Cunningham, met as students at Wooster, and because his mother taught anthropology at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, Cunningham-Rhoads was familiar with the educational value of a small, liberal arts college. His Wooster experience proved transformational, from his time on the baseball team, including pitching the team’s second no-hitter in history, to his Independent Study that became a direct line drive to his work in sports analytics. 

When it came time to plan his I.S., Cunningham-Rhoads decided he wanted to tackle a curiosity that occurred to him from watching football games. As a baseball fan, he wasn’t exposed to football much until he got to college in Ohio. “Everybody was constantly obsessed with Ohio State football, so I started to watch games and wanted to know more about it,” he said. As an outsider, he began to wonder about little aspects of the game that maybe others who were deeply indoctrinated into the sport didn’t question. When field goal kickers were called “great” by sportscasters because they were successful on 95% of their kicks, the statistic didn’t consider differences in variables, such as the distance of the kicks. “I heard broadcasters say, ‘This guy is a really good player,’ but there was no data or proof other than ‘Just trust us,’” Cunningham-Rhoads said. 

His curiosity became his I.S. research question. Breaking down what distinguished one field goal kicker from another piqued his logical, math-centered brain. The goal was to create a metric or statistic to provide solid data to back up statements about who was the best field goal kicker. With the help of his I.S. mentor, Drew Pasteur, professor of mathematics, Cunningham-Rhoads determined the information needed to answer the question. He gathered data about all the National Football League field goal kicks over a three- to four- year span. He included weather data by matching stadiums with Weather Channel details, if the fields were grass or turf, and whether games were high pressure, at a home stadium, or in a small- sized stadium. 

After collecting thousands of data points, he used mathematical modeling with artificial neural networks, designed to mimic how neural networks work in the brain. “Dr. Pasteur helped me critically evaluate the model’s results, draw appropriate conclusions, and recognize extraneous variables that might not be measurable through the data,” Cunningham-Rhoads said. “Having a dataset that truly encompasses everything that you need” is one of the most important lessons he said he continues to use in his work at Stats Perform. 

New computer technology and software make collecting data today less time-consuming than it was for his I.S. and in the early days as a data collector at the company. However, today as an AI data analyst, Cunningham-Rhoads uses the same I.S. research process repeatedly. “I.S. gave me the keys to task myself with finding a question and then answering it, to be curious about whatever you’re watching, whatever you’re seeing, or any kind of data, and then create a plan for being able to actually answer that question,” he said. The process includes collecting the data, taking the data, massaging it into a usable format, and creating new metrics. He has helped create 75 football metrics, several baseball metrics, and an entire golf system. “My job is to have ideas about new things we can do with new data or questions that we can think about in different ways than what currently exists,” he said, acknowledging his ability to explain those metrics came from his minor in education at Wooster. “Being able to take sometimes advanced concepts in math and make them more observable to a greater number of people is a really important skill.” 

Sports gambling and fantasy sports leagues have changed the industry in recent years. He called fantasy football “one of the biggest boons to the NFL” because of the way it drives more people to watch the sport. Sportsbook and fantasy league operators rely on people getting to their sites to place bets or engage in fantasy sports. Stats Perform provides fun factoids about the games that inspire people to visit their sites, Cunningham-Rhoads explained. As a so-called “fantasy football expert,” he spends most of the football season pouring over data and creating player projections for the upcoming week of games. The editorial content is hosted on the company’s Opta Analyst website. “A lot of our metrics are there and visible to the public,” he said. The company also provides reports to pro teams and college teams with information like managerial projections and season simulations. 

Cunningham-Rhoads credited the History of Black America class taught by Shannon King, former associate professor of history at Wooster, for opening his eyes and mind to think or see things differently. “You look at history through the lens of the present rather than trying to understand what the world context was in that moment,” he said. Listening to the diversity of ideas in the class taught him to think about issues or questions from different directions. “I believe the true innovative thinking that I’ve been able to do at Stats Perform has been a direct line from the I.S. and classes like that,” he said. 

Photo provided by Cunningham-Rhoads

This feature originally appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Wooster magazine.

Posted in Alumni, Magazine on June 1, 2024.