What Is Happening to PFF?

Sam Monson and Steve Palazzolo, the faces of Pro Football Focus, have announced their departures from the company. Monson and Palazzolo will be bringing their podcast (or rather, starting a new podcast) to 33rd Team, a relatively new company headed up by former NFL general manager Mike Tannenbaum.

For PFF, it’s an end of an era – an exit that underscores what seems to be a crisis of attrition throughout the company.

In the past several years, PFF has lost the talents of several of its brightest minds, whether through departure, layoffs or outright firings. That includes people on the content side like Palazzolo and Monson as well as those behind the scenes working to advance the core mission of the company.

Lead NFL analysts Monson and Palazzolo are joining lead draft analyst Mike Renner, lead data analyst Eric Eager, head of engineering Geoff Lane, general manager of football Rick Drummond and former CEO and founder Neil Hornsby as recent departures.

Along with them include lead contract analyst Brad Spielberger, breaking news maven Ari Meirov, associate content director Austin Gayle, journalist Doug Kyed, data analyst Kevin Cole and a host of others. Ian Perks, PFF’s first employee, departed six months ago after 16 years there – around the same time Drummond left after 14 years at the company.

For a company as small as PFF – it has fewer than 250 employees – the turnover is quite significant, especially given how many of those departures come from mission-critical personnel. What’s going on at PFF? And will it continue?

The now-maligned director of all consumer-facing products, George Chahrouri, was “quietly fired,” according to A.J. Perez at Front Office Sports. FOS matched Chahrouri’s tenure as the primary executive in charge of the consumer side of the business with the “exodus of talent” throughout the company. Numerous anonymous sources told FOS that Chahrouri’s management was the primary reason that well-regarded and highly performant employees left the company.

Wide Left has spoken to several former and current employees of PFF who corroborate Perez’s reporting.

“Everyone’s fucking leaving because people no longer believe in the leaders of the company,” said one. Upon clarification, the source clarified that Chahrouri was one of those leaders. The other two were Cris Collinsworth, the CEO, and his son, Austin Collinsworth – the Chief Operating Officer.

Chahrouri has earned the lion’s share of criticism following FOS’ report, and fairly so. Wide Left dug into the general perception of Chahrouri as a leader and every source willing to speak on the subject confirmed the volatile, offensive and sometimes scary leadership style Chahrouri would employ.

Purple Insider’s Matthew Coller wrote the definitive history of the company in his book, Football Is A Numbers Game, and revealed that PFF was forced to settle a lawsuit for toxic workplace behavior stemming from Chahrouri’s actions – a $20,000 settlement.

Wide Left has since learned that the mistreatment included repeated, shouted slurs. Chahrouri’s outbursts weren’t just limited to one employee, either. He would often use slurs around the office, typically ableist in nature, and scared employees by repeatedly yelling. Sometimes, one former employee reported, Chahrouri would even yell at complete strangers.

The consumer side was managed by a combination team of Chahrouri and Austin Gayle. Coller goes into great detail on Gayle’s background and that chapter alone is worth the read, but notable for this report is that not a single employee that Wide Left talked to had a bad thing to say about Gayle, which matches the regard that Coller’s book portrays for the former PFF employee.

“Austin [Gayle] was this incredible guy to get people to do productive things. From George [Chahrouri’s] self-interest it was very necessary for Austin to be there,” said one former employee. “Everyone liked him.”

A critical component to PFF’s rise from 2019 to 2022, Gayle played a variety of roles for the company before finding himself in a high-level management position interfacing between Chahrouri and the employees below them.

Multiple former employees used identical phrasing to describe Chahrouri’s skill as an office politician, which is that he could “manage up, but not manage down.” In more straightforward terms, Chahrouri knew how to please those in power and regarded those below him with contempt.

Chahrouri seems aware that he didn’t have any particular ability to manage subordinates, and played a role in keeping others with that skill set around but in positions below him. This is partially why Gayle didn’t move even further up the ladder despite his vital role in multiplying the revenue the company saw over his tenure in content management.

“Austin was the best,” said one ex-employee. “Austin was one of the best people in the company. He was gonna be better than that someday, easily, everybody can see it. When years go by without a big promotion, it looks odd.”

“Once Austin left,” the employee added, “Then a lot of people started to see that, like, George [Chahrouri] simply can't manage his way out of a paper bag.”

Gayle’s departure to the Ringer was seen as long overdue to some employees who wondered why he wasn’t given more responsibility but also a signal that this might be “the beginning of the end.”

Without Gayle to mediate Chahrouri’s management, his faults were laid bare. Coller’s book outlines a man obsessed with winning – or rather, not losing. Chahrouri described himself as someone who would, growing up, throw tantrums after losses in sports or any other activity.

It seems as if his emotional regulation never developed in that area – he’d often punt basketballs into the bleachers after losses, punch walls when meetings didn’t go his way and yell at employees – whether or not a failure was their fault – when KPIs weren’t being met.

Chahrouri’s place – alongside the CEO’s son – was described as “a mixture of nepotism and stupidity” to Front Office Sports. The pressure to remove Chahrouri from an official role within company grew too great and he was let go.

But several sources allege that Chahrouri has not been wholly removed from the company. Though he has burned many of the relationships he made – he didn’t invite many of his closest former colleagues to his recent wedding – he still consults for PFF on the side, according to multiple sources.

Chahrouri no longer appears in the office or the company Slack channels but seemingly still influences the direction of the organization and, allegedly, receives compensation for his efforts.

Collinsworth is loyal to those he considers to be elite talents, and he counts Chahrouri among that group. Unfortunately, Collinsworth also considered Gayle and founder Neil Hornsby to be extraordinary assets and Chahrouri’s presence drove both away from the company.

Coller describes “tension” between Collinsworth, Chahrouri and Hornsby as an underlying cause for Hornsby’s exit. Hornsby’s belief that PFF was primarily a data company rather than a media company clashed with the content direction PFF was taking, supercharged by the Silver Lake investment.

Despite the promise from Collinsworth to Hornsby that “there’s no way I’m letting you go,” Collinsworth had to make a choice.

The crowded roles at the top caused conflict and Hornsby was moved into a vice chair role without clearly defined responsibilities. One source described it as a “fairy tale” role. That didn’t resolve the tensions and Hornsby continued to see a fundamental incompatibility between his presence and the direction of the company.

Another former employee describes Hornsby as having given an ultimatum about Chahrouri to Collinsworth – “it’s him or me.”

Collinsworth made his decision. Hornsby took a sabbatical, then left for good.

This isn’t the case of a good manager versus a bad manager; Hornsby is a titan in the football analytics industry but had significant weaknesses as a leader, especially as the company transitioned from a scrappy startup to a full-fledged professional operation.

Nevertheless, it represents the conflict pulling PFF in different directions – and possibly pulling them apart.

Pro Football Focus had, in a way, lost focus.

PFF effectively runs two businesses – the consumer side that most people see includes the grades and premium statistics package which costs users about $120 a year.

Then there’s the business-to-business (B2B) side that features not just the premium statistics but something far more valuable: a fully customizable suite of personnel and situation-specific statistics and play-by-play that marries with a video system, allowing users to find and watch all of the plays that match very specific parameters.

That’s pretty abstract, but a concrete example can demonstrate why it’s so appealing – an NFL coach can look for every snap that Group of Five left tackles played against an FBS edge rusher on third down when the quarterback takes a five- or seven-step drop on plays where the game is within two scores but outside of the final two minutes.

Or, in preparation for their next opponent, a coach could look for all plays that an opposing cornerback defended an in-breaking route on first down off of play-action against a wide receiver but not a tight end. They can see all the plays where a team runs with two tight ends in their personnel package and see how often that team runs the ball and how they choose to run the ball.

These virtual cut-ups are generated instantly and are paired with accompanying statistics – that G5 tackle lookup gave a result for a player who only allowed a pressure rate of 3.4 percent, the best of any G5 left tackle.

It was Bernhard Raimann in 2021. A scout can click one button and see a video playlist of all 75 of those non-garbage time third-down five-or-seven-step-drop pass-blocking snaps against FBS opponents within seconds.

The grades are thrown in, but are immaterial to the business consumers who purchase PFF’s Ultimate product – a $150,000 titan of a solution that includes individually generated matchup reports for teams about to gameplan for their upcoming opponent.

Before PFF, creating a red zone cutup could take several hours instead of several minutes. And the tendency report on an upcoming opponent would have taken so much time that a quality control assistant would often have to do most of the legwork before the previous game had even started, drafting advance work on opponents weeks ahead and updating it with the most recent game. Even then, it would arrive late on Tuesday, rather than Monday morning.

Teams are generally not interested in questions like “how good is Myles Garrett compared to T.J. Watt,” but rather “how often does Myles Garrett rush to the inside shoulder of the offensive tackle when there’s no tight end help and the quarterback is in shotgun?”

As Coller details in his book, that product – PFF Ultimate – was built almost entirely by Drummond, who realized that NFL teams weren’t like NBA and MLB teams and didn’t have much use for a direct stream of data or an API to access it, but rather needed a user-friendly interface so that the primary users of the data – NFL coaches – could intuitively access it.

Drummond, who joined the company in 2010, moved the B2B side forward by automating the process by which teams would access PFF data and along the way designed PFF Ultimate.

Prior to his involvement, teams would query PFF analysts directly for reports or specific data and an employee would go through an Excel spreadsheet to build a custom answer to the question before uploading it to DropBox. Now, teams log in to the portal and build their query within seconds using a database instead of a spreadsheet.

For those unfamiliar with the difference between the two, it’s massive enough to generate multiple profanity-laden tirades about the subject.

The B2B side has a ceiling – there are only so many NFL, FBS and FCS teams willing and able to purchase the product. But, that part of the company generated significant revenue. By the most recent estimate provided to Wide Left, that number is north of $15 million.

By contrast, the consumer side generates about $5 million and costs more to maintain – a few developers can maintain the B2B product, but a number of content creators, editors, producers and marketers are involved with the consumer side.

That revenue number is likely to go down, not up, as they lose Monson and Palazzolo. Their podcast is a behemoth, regularly ranked inside the Top 25 of iTunes’ football podcast rankings with an accompanying YouTube live show that generates several thousand viewers – sometimes as many as 50,000.

Nevertheless, the Silver Lake investment into PFF – reported by FOS to be a $50 million stake of a company valued at $160 million, or 31.25% of the shares – meant that they would concentrate on areas of potential growth rather than on reliable revenue generators.