At age 5, he was color-coding the TV Guide, looking for scheduling patterns. At 14, he was creating his hometown’s Little League baseball schedule.
Now, Kevin Pauga, ’04, is a star in the fanatical sphere of college basketball analytics.
As assistant athletic director for administration, Pauga masterminds the men’s basketball team’s schedule, travel, budget, and summer camps. But his skills outside of work are gaining attention.
While still a senior in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, Pauga created his own method of dissecting teams’ data and predicting future performances. Ever since, he’s been adding slews of information to a massive Excel fi le, which he calls “the master schedule.” He’s dubbed it the KPI. And it’s landed him in the stratosphere of older, revered forecasters, or “mathletes.”
KPI has garnered headlines in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ESPN. com, and Sports Illustrated. Even the NCAA is taking note.
But Pauga just does it for fun. In 2014, he started posting KPI online for free. “KPI quantifi es what every individual win and every individual loss means, with the idea that rather than giving a team’s ranking, it’s ranking a team’s entire résumé—from best win to worst loss.
“That makes it a little more exacting than other long-established formulas,” he said.
Next time you see him, try to imagine what he might be tracking as the matrix grows, one game at a time.
