How Cris Collinsworth Made Millions Buying Pro Football Focus

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Friends,

Pro Football Focus (PFF) has become the go-to name in football analytics. The Cincinnati-based company works with all 32 NFL teams and 150 college football teams, including 95% of Power 5 schools. More than 20 million people see their data each week on Sunday Night Football, and the business was valued at $160 million in 2021.

But PFF has changed a lot over the last few years. For example, PFF raised $50 million from private equity firm Silver Lake last year to expand into European football and more consumer products. PFF also conducted layoffs last year, firing 7% of the company’s salaried workforce. And many people are starting to wonder what the long-term future of the Cris Collinsworth-owned company actually looks like.

So today’s newsletter (and podcast) will break down the money and business behind PFF, including its founding, its fast rise in the world of football, and where the business stands today. Enjoy!

The Pro Football Focus (PFF) story started in 2007. Neil Hornsby was living 30 miles North of London in a town called Luton. He had a degree in physics and ran a business consultancy providing process-and-program management advising to the hotel industry. But more importantly, Hornsby had fallen in love with American football in the 1980s, and he couldn’t believe how bad the NFL’s existing analysis process was.

That’s when Hornsby launched PFF. The initial idea was two-fold: 1) create a better scouting and analysis process based on NFL game film and 2) meet other NFL fans.

“I’d go to the gym and train with me buddies, and all they wanted to talk about was Liverpool against Chelsea,” Neil Hornsby told The Ringer in 2019. “Nobody gave a monkey’s about who was doing what in the NFL. So when I started PFF, it was really to try and have some interesting conversations with high-end fans in the U.S., and I think what we did was we sort of overshot our target market a little bit.”

Now, things started slow for PFF. Hornsby was analyzing NFL games and providing detailed reports, but PFF only generated 80 page views per week.

Still, Hornsby kept at it — and with PFF guaranteeing an evaluation of every play of every player of every game throughout the NFL season, their work started to spread amongst NFL analysts, fantasy football players, sports bettors, and more.

Then, PFF received its big break in 2009. Hornsby published a complete analysis of the 2008 NFL season just one week before the 2009 NFL season. It was extremely detailed and caught the attention of Jon Berger, the director of football information for the Giants.

This kicked off a relationship between PFF and the New York Giants, including detailed scouting reports sent to the team during their 2011 Super Bowl run.

"It's definitely valuable information," Jon Berger told the Wall Street Journal in 2012.

Neil Hornsby then shut down his consulting business and decided to focus on PFF full-time, even though that meant taking an 80% pay cut. This helped PFF add 12 more NFL clients, and the company was doing $1 million in annual revenue by 2014.

Pro Football Focus (PFF) has come a long way over the last decade. The analytics company now provides weekly proprietary data to all 32 NFL teams and 150 college football programs, including 95% of all Power 5 college football teams.

PFF’s business can be broken down into three parts:

1. Professional services: PFF provides data analysis services to NFL and college teams, NFL agents, and media companies. For context, an NFL team might pay high six figures annually for the data while an FBS school pays mid-five figures.

2. Subscriptions: In addition to free data on its website, PFF has a subscription service called PFF+. This product is marketed to diehard NFL and NCAA football fans, fantasy football players, and sports bettors, and costs $24.99 per month.

3. Content: PFF creates a variety of digital content, including written pieces and podcasts. Most of this content is monetized through advertisements with companies like FanDuel, while a smaller portion is behind the PFF+ paywall.

The overall PFF brand has grown a lot, too. For example, PFF now has more than 3.6 million followers on social media. They have about 200 full-time corporate employees and a few hundred part-time employees who work as graders for games. And you will see their data commonly referenced on Sunday Night Football broadcasts (see below).

PFF certainly has a good product, but Cris Collinsworth deserves a lot of credit, too.

Cris Collinsworth first heard about PFF in 2014. The former NFL wide receiver was looking to boost his data collection to better prepare for Sunday Night Football. So, he bought an annual subscription to PFF, which drastically reduced his studying process.

Collinsworth then sent an email through the PFF website, and Neil Hornsby gave him a call, although Hornsby’s English accent made Collinsworth think it was a scam.

“I thought I’d been scammed,’’ Collinsworth told Sports Illustrated’s Peter King. “So I figured I would ask him a bunch of questions, you know, to expose him … and after about five minutes I could tell he was absolutely legit, so I just shut up and listened to Neil talk about football at a very high level.” 

Collinsworth then tested Hornsby by having them each separately grade the same game. And the results were so impressive — Collinsworth and Hornsby had nearly identical grades for the same game — that Collinsworth made Neil Hornsby an offer.

In 2014, Collinsworth reached an agreement with Neil Hornsby to buy a majority stake in PFF for $6 million. Hornsby then shifted from CEO to COO and moved his family (and the company) from England to Cincinnati to be closer to Collinsworth.

This ended up being a smart move for PFF because Cris Collinsworth was able to help PFF break into college football analysis. He also helped PFF grades become a feature on NBC’s Sunday Night Football, which is only a fraction of what PFF provides the network for Sunday Night Football broadcasts (they also provide data used during game broadcasts, 80-page scouting reports for producers to use, etc.)

So, we all know PFF is a household name today. The company went from being valued at ~$10 million when Cris Collinsworth bought a majority stake for $6 million in 2014 to $160 million when Silver Lake invested $50 million for a minority stake in 2021.

Still, that doesn’t mean everything is going well. PFF talks about how they will break into soccer and why the explosion of fantasy football and sports betting will drive their valuation even higher. But PFF also laid off 16 full-time employees and 11 interns last year (7% of their salaried workforce). Founder Neil Hornsby left the company in 2021 after a year-long sabbatical, and PFF reportedly spent a large amount of Silver Lake’s $50 million on developing an iPhone app.

Many people still believe in the long-term vision of PFF, of course. Data is only becoming more prevalent in sports, and with so many untapped markets (international expansion, sports betting, soccer, etc.) PFF may still be a billion-dollar business.

That’s why I see this more as growing pains for a small business becoming a big business. Cris Collinsworth has never had to be a CEO before, and NBC certainly takes up a lot of his time during the NFL season. Hiring good people is paramount, but I’m more interested in seeing how the business performs over the next decade.

PFF has a big lead on the competition. Now, let’s see if they can hold everyone off.

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Huddle Up is a 3x weekly newsletter that breaks down the business and money behind sports. If you are not already a subscriber, sign up and join 100,000+ others who receive it directly in their inbox each week.

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