Alec Halaby is searching for that ‘next edge’ in analytics after rising from Eagles intern to assistant GM

Roughly 15 years ago, Alec Halaby sent his resumé to all 32 NFL teams.

He was studying English with a minor in economics at Harvard at the time, but a brief stint at Football Outsiders led to a passion for analytics. Halaby, a former high-school quarterback from Madison, Wis., wasn’t in a position to be picky with where he’d end up, but got a lucky break nonetheless when he got a call back from Howie Roseman.

“I was looking to get in wherever I could,” Halaby told reporters Friday. “I’m deeply grateful that Howie at that point realized, ‘I’ll give this kid a shot.’”

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Halaby co-opted two internships with the team into several positions on the football operations and personnel sides of the Eagles front office through the last 15 years. He was appointed assistant general manager in 2022 along with Jon Ferrari. Before that, he spent six years as vice president of football operations and was a “special assistant to the general manager” from 2012-15.

Speaking to a small group of reporters Friday, Halaby detailed his role in the Eagles front office since his 2022 promotion.

“I’m fortunate to be able to work across a lot of different parts of the operation,” Halaby said. “The bulk of my time is spent on personnel with our pro guys and our college guys, but I spend a lot of time with analytics, obviously, I have a history there. I spend a lot of time with our cap guys. I spend a lot of time with our sports performance, a lot of time with our coaches.”

While his role has expanded, Halaby’s roots are in analytics. He’s been an instrumental figure in the front office at implementing data-driven principles, even when it drew the ire of coaches and staffers at times.

The team website says his focuses spanned across multiple areas with “particular emphasis on integrating traditional and analytical methods in decision-making.”

Even now, part of his job is still working numbers into the Eagles process for player evaluation and in-game management for an organization led by owner Jeffrey Lurie and Roseman, who were early adopters of analytics.

“I think the reception here has really followed the trajectory of baseball and basketball,” Halaby said. “As the data gets bigger, as it gets more informative, as it gets more granular, then people understand that it can help them and it’s not trying to displace anything. It’s just you’re trying to help yourself make a better decision.

“There’s definitely been more acceptance over time,” he added. “But I would say that football coaches, by nature, are very empirical. They have always broken down tendencies, they’ve always analyzed opponents, they may not call it analytics, but it’s been a part of the process for coaches for literally 50 years, if you read about guys in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s.”

That acceptance wasn’t always widespread in the Eagles organization during Halaby’s tenure. According to an Inquirer report in 2021, Halaby has had his share of detractors, most notably former coach Doug Pederson.

Halaby refuted the notion that he and Pederson had a rocky relationship, pointing to the success the team had during Pederson’s tenure.

“I felt like I had a productive relationship with Doug,” Halaby said. “I liked working with Doug, I think he was a great coach. So I looked at that as a positive period. We won a lot of games. For me, the narrative outside wasn’t necessarily how I experienced it inside, but I would say that I learned a lot from Doug.”

The acceptance of analytics in the Eagles building may have been ahead of most teams for a time, but the rest of the league has started catching up in adopting and using data.

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The shifting landscape of analytics in football has presented a new challenge for Halaby, who said he spends significant time searching for different metrics to implement to find the “next edge.”

When asked what might be next, Halaby pointed to player-tracking as an area of analytics that could become more important as the sample size expands over time.

“It’s just a continuous process of looking for the next edge,” Halaby said. “... Some of the low-hanging fruit that was maybe there 15 years ago when we started isn’t there anymore. Everyone has jumped to that frontier. It’s more of an intellectual challenge.”

Halaby’s role has grown beyond the scope of strictly numbers, though. He’s followed a similar career trajectory as Roseman, who started in football operations before making the switch to the personnel side of things, evaluating draft prospects and players in the league.

In the past, most prospective general managers had extensive backgrounds in scouting, but that’s changed in recent years with teams hiring executives with more unconventional backgrounds.

The Eagles’ front office structure is even unconventional beyond Roseman, who’s been with the Eagles for over two decades. With Halaby and Ferrari as the two highest-ranking members underneath Roseman, the organization went away from the typical structure with one executive from the personnel side of things and another from football operations.

Halaby and Ferrari’s promotions and titles, (previously, the team didn’t use the title “assistant GM”) came in part because of significant turnover in the front office during the 2022 offseason, when four high-ranking executives each left for assistant GM roles elsewhere.

When asked what role film study has in his evaluation process now that he’s a bigger part of personnel decisions, Halaby noted he’s been learning tape study from coaches and front-office members his entire tenure with the Eagles, pointing to former assistant coaches Howard Mudd and Jim Washburn as early mentors.

“Probably as long as I’ve been here,” Halaby said. “If I’m going to evaluate someone, I’m going to look at the numbers, and I’m going to look at the video. Now certainly some of the roles and responsibilities have changed over time, but since I came into the league, I’ve thought that you need to understand the players through both those lenses. You weren’t going to capture it all through analytics, and you weren’t going to capture it all just visually.”