More N.F.L. Teams Hire Statisticians But Their Use Remains Mostly Guarded Jeff Dominitz grew up rooting for the Washington Redskins during their glory years under Joe Gibbs. So when an N.F.L. team called him in 2006 about a job doing statistical research and analysis for the scouting department, he could not say no. He left his teaching position at Carnegie Mellon and, temporarily, his family and wound up living alone near the team's headquarters. The first sign that Dominitz's work might not be fully embraced came when he reported to the team's facility. According to Dominitz, who has a Ph.D. in economics, he was told that the head coach had been informed about Dominitz after he was already hired. The coach's response, Dominitz was told, was, "We're still about people here." Dominitz then learned that he would be seated not with the scouting department, compiling detailed information about player prospects, but at a cubicle in a separate building, with the marketing department. Seven weeks later, Dominitz was gone. Dominitz later spent a few years working for another team, predicting how athletes would do in the N.F.L. based on their college and predraft performances, as well as analyzing overtime decision-making, among other tasks. Now the senior director at a Beverly Hills, Calif., economics consulting firm, he has given a lot of thought to why the rigorous study of advanced statistics is gaining a toehold among N.F.L. teams years after it swept through baseball and, more recently, the N.B.A. "It can't just be money," he said in a telephone interview. It's got to be some concern about the impact on the rest of the organization. You could see it in them putting me in the marketing building, trying to have as little impact on the rest of the organization as possible. To me, it's crazy not to try. It can only be a firm belief that it just can't work or the process of making it work will fail because you'll have so much resistance from the coaching staff. But when the Baltimore Ravens announced in August that they had hired a director of football analytics, it was a rare public signal of the growing interest among teams in weaving statistical analysis into game-day, draft and free-agency preparation, and even into the management of workouts and injury rehabilitation. Several companies now study games to produce unique statistical analysis, including Football Outsiders, Advanced NFL Stats, Stats L.L.C. and ESPN. Few teams like to talk about the degree to which they use analytics because they fear giving away a competitive advantage. One general manager whose team does delve into statistics, but who didn't want to be identified, wondered why the Ravens announced the hire at all. This general manager suspects that more teams do some form of statistical analysis than are publicly known. People who work in sports statistics, and coaches and general managers, agree that there has been a shift in the N.F.L."s guarded thinking. "The culture has changed exponentially in the last 12 months," said John Pollard, a general manager for Stats L.L.C. "Last year was a jog. Now we're at a really good trot. This January, I think we'll be at a sprint with the mass adoption of tons of information services. The question remains how the shift changes a team and the game. Gil Brandt, a former personnel executive for the Dallas Cowboys, points to one way the league is already different. With advanced statistics, he notes, teams are able to see trends and adjust in real time. It used to be that teams would look back at how often they ran a play and how much it gained. Now, do they want to know Cam Newton's completion percentage when a defense rushes three? Or four? Or six or more? That information is available week to week, allowing teams to tailor game plans with far greater specificity. Much of the work is also centered on figuring out some of the game's most vexing problems - when to kick a field goal versus going for it on fourth down; what to do under the new overtime rules; when to challenge a call; when to use a timeout - amid the chaos of the sideline.