6 Career Points from an NFL Football Analyst | HireEdge Careers Unlocked

This post is part of our Careers Unlocked series, where we talk to professionals across industries about their career paths and advice for college students and grads entering the job market. Watch the full episode with Buffalo Bills football analyst Cole Jacobson here: Cole Jacobson on Careers Unlocked. 

Cole Jacobson analyzes data for the Buffalo Bills, helping the coaching staff and front office make roster and game-planning decisions. Before the NFL, he coached at Harvard-Westlake High School, worked as a college football analyst with Championship Analytics, and wrote for outlets like Football Outsiders and SB Nation. He studied math at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also played varsity sprint football.

Here are six takeaways from our conversation with him.

1. Specialize instead of spreading yourself thin. Jacobson says being a generalist actually hurt him early in his career. He compares the job market to a video game roster: nobody gets hired for being an 80-overall player across every skill. His advice is to pick one specific, even niche, thing and work toward being excellent at that one thing.
   
   
2. Your public work matters more than your job title. Competing in the NFL's Big Data Bowl and writing for sites like Football Outsiders and his own Substack did more for his career than any individual job on his résumé, he says — both for building real coding skills and for putting his name in front of the right people.
   
   
3. Cold outreach can actually work. Jacobson's connection to the Bills traces back to a single direct message he sent to a team analyst in 2023. That contact eventually referred him to his current boss. His take: persistence and a willingness to be "shameless" about sharing your work matter more than any one lucky break.
   
   
4. Data only matters if people trust it. Jacobson says his team's job isn't to make decisions — it's to arm coaches and scouts with information they can act on. Even the most accurate model is worthless, he argues, if you can't get decision-makers in the room to believe in it and use it.
   
   
5. Every class you take is building something, even if it doesn't feel like it. Jacobson points to a Philosophy of Sport class and a Game Theory course at Penn — neither obviously "practical" — as having shaped how he thinks about ethics and decision-making in his current role.
   
   
6. AI is a tool, not a shortcut, at least for now. At this stage, Jacobson mainly uses AI to troubleshoot code, not to inform football decisions. He cites both trust issues with stakeholders and open questions about data security as reasons the technology hasn't taken over more of his day-to-day work yet.
   
   

Want more advice from professionals across industries? Check out the full Careers Unlocked podcast series on our HireEdge YouTube Channel.

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