Home

I'm happy you're here.  I'm Eric Eager, VP and Partner at SumerSports, a sports analytics startup profiled here in the Wall Street Journal. I run a team of data scientists, machine learning engineers, and subject matter experts on research and development problems at the interface between football and quantitative analysis. 

I'm also the co-author of the football Football Analytics with Python & R, which you can order here. 

Prior to joining Sumer, I was with PFF, a worldwide leader in sports analysis and analytics, with clients including all 32 NFL teams, over 130 college football teams, and media entities like NBC, NFL Network, CBS and ESPN, as well as other American football leagues like the CFL and other sports like soccer. 

I co-host the SumerSports Show with Eric Eager and Thomas Dimitroff, the winningest general manager in the history of the Atlanta Falcons and the current CEO of Sumer.  In this podcast we talk about how to solve problems with traditional and analytical approaches to football.  We also host The SumerSports 2024 Draft Show on Sirius XM NFL Radio, Channel 88. 

I also co-host the Red, Gold and Bold and Too Deep podcasts with my friends Soren Petro of WHB in Kansas City and Jeff Chadiha of the NFL Network, which cover the Kansas City Chiefs and National Football League, respectively.  I am also an equity partner an a creator in The Hammer, and do a show for them called Forward Progress. 






Prior to my sports analytics career, I was a tenured professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse from 2012 through 2018.  I earned my PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Nebraska, where research interests were in the mathematical modeling of biology, sociology and business, as well as the scholarship of teaching and learning.  My thesis advisors were Richard Rebarber and Brigitte Tenhumberg.  

A list of my peer-reviewed publications and selected presentations can be found here and here, respectively, and included work that has been published in top journals like the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, the Journal of Mathematical Biology, The American Naturalist, and Theoretical Population Biology.  Two of my lines of research were cited frequently in two recent books, Stephen Ellner's Data-Driven Modeling of Structured Populations and Robert Talbert's Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty I have served on the editorial board of Natural Resource Modeling, and as a guest editor for Letters in Biomathematics. I served as a reviewer for numerous mathematical biology, ecology, and dynamical systems journals, and currently a reviewer for the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. 


While at UWL, I had a strong interest in mentoring undergraduate students, co-directing UW-L's Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) in Mathematical Ecology (NSF - DMS 1559663).  I was also a Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics (CURM) fellow during the 2015-16 academic year, and a University of Wisconsin System Teaching Fellow during the 2017-18 academic year.  In total, I raised over $300,000 to fund undergraduate research from 2015-2018.  I was and am a big proponent of the flipped classroom, and as such a collection of some of my lecture videos can be found on my YouTube page. If you find these useful, please subscribe and leave a rating.

I currently teach a Linear Algebra for Data Science course on DataCamp's platform, Wharton Moneyball Training Camp for Wharton's Global Youth Progam, and executive education for Arizona State's Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Even while outside of academia, I maintain a strong interest in mentorship and scholarship.  For inquiries my personal email is ericeager82@gmail.com. Please do not be offended if it takes a few days or weeks for me to respond. I am open to academic collaboration in sports analytics (leading and/or supporting roles), applied mathematics/mathematical biology (supporting role), and the scholarship of teaching and learning (supporting role). 

Most of my activity on social media is sports analytics related, and you can find me on Twitter, Instagram, Threads and TikTok at @ericeager_.