The story of the Cowboys’ offseason has been about their defensive rebuild, and rightfully so, but Brian Schottenheimer and the rest of the organization aren’t ignoring other aspects of the team that need improving. On Friday, the Cowboys added two new people to their growing analytics department.
The Cowboys had previously listed the strategic football fellow position as a summer internship role, though the potential for season-long extensions exist. Some of the key job duties in the original description included:
- Data tracking to develop internal metrics
- Help creating data-driven reports, visualizations, and engineering processes
- Assisting with recording and processing the player-tracking data from wearable technology during offseason practices and training camp practices
- Working with the rest of the analytics department to support coaching staff and front office in applying data-driven solutions across the board
Essentially, this position amounts to being an extra body in the offseason to help manage the increased workload of the department. Other organizations, like the Eagles and Ravens, frequently use similar roles to process everything they need to do in the offseason while also deepening their bench of full-time staffers going forward.
As for the two that are joining the Cowboys, Nick Fullerton comes to the Cowboys after spending the 2025 season working as a research analyst with the NFL’s Next Gen Stats department. Prior to that, Fullerton held multiple roles with the SMU football team while completing his master’s in data science and applied statistics.
Fullerton was the lead analytics intern for the Mustangs for his two full seasons there, helping out the player personnel team on the scouting side, before spending his final season at SMU also working as a student assistant with the special teams unit. Prior to SMU, Fullerton attended Arizona State, where he earned a degree in data science.
Fullerton was also part of a three-person team that made a submission to the NFL’s 2024 Big Data Bowl, an annual football analytics contest. Fullerton’s submission focused on the Houston Texans, specifically their defense that had just finished second in the league in missed tackles. Fullerton’s piece, which can be read here, studied the root of the issue and made suggestions for player acquisitions to fix the issue.
Vincent Etherton, on the other hand, comes to the Cowboys from Princeton, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science. Etherton spent his time at Princeton in a variety of different applications outside of his regular studies. He was a data reporter for The Daily Princetonian – the school paper – where he rose from a contributing reporter to the paper’s head data editor. Etherton also worked as the team manager for the football program’s data analytics group.
Etherton also spent the past year as an intern with Lambent Data, a technology and data solutions firm specializing in the healthcare and social services field. According to Etherton’s bio on Lambent’s website, Etherton focused on machine learning theory, data science research, and applying AI to create useful dashboards for organizing data.
These two additions come only a few months after the Cowboys were recognized as one of the top analytics departments in the NFL by an internal poll of analytics staffers. John Park, the head of the team’s formally-named Strategic Football Operations department, is focused on continuing that positive momentum within the organization.
Back at the beginning of the month, the Cowboys also hired Sathya Balakumar to be a football data engineer, bringing him over from aerospace defense giant Lockheed Martin. Park has looked high and low for talented individuals, unafraid to hire people with unconventional football backgrounds.
The hope is that this continued momentum helps the Cowboys reach the start of the regular season in a place where Park’s department can provide everything to the coaches and front office that they could possibly ask for, resulting in a more informed and more confident organization overall.
