Calling an Audible 

Super Bowl LI is best known for the New England Patriots’ historic comeback win over the Atlanta Falcons in 2017. But for Cynthia Frelund ’05, the game is unforgettable for a different reason. It was the first Super Bowl Frelund worked as a data analyst for the NFL Network, and as she walked into the massive NRG Stadium in Houston that Sunday afternoon, she was overcome with emotion. What on earth am I doing here? she thought to herself. How did I get here?

Frelund has covered every Super Bowl since. With her long blonde hair and sparkly outfits, she’s slightly more glamorous than your typical data scientist, but she has quickly become one of the most recognizable faces of predictive analytics in professional sports. A branch of data science, predictive analytics examines data from the past to make predictions about the future. Frelund uses a data analytics model she built to predict what will happen in football games, and to tell stories across a variety of NFL Network shows and platforms. On NFL GameDay View, for instance, she predicts the scores of games to be played in the coming week. On NFL GameDay Morning, meanwhile, she makes more granular estimates, such as the number of yards, touchdowns, and receptions she expects a particular running back to have. Then there’s NFL Fantasy Live, on which Frelund helps viewers decide who to play in their fantasy football matchups.

And Frelund has plenty else to keep her busy. She writes analytics-informed articles for the NFL website, and travels frequently to contribute to broadcasts for league events such as the Super Bowl, the annual draft, and team training camps. She also updates her social media accounts for her approximately four hundred thousand followers, and each week she puts out a new episode of her YouTube show, Numbers Game with Cynthia Frelund, during which she cheerily breaks down sports data.

Frelund’s analysis can be very detailed. In one recent video, she explained that over the past season, 22 percent of the passes thrown by Denver Broncos rookie quarterback Bo Nix came while he was on the run—meaning while he was moving at a minimum of eight miles per hour. That was the second-highest rate in the NFL. That same whirlwind thirty-minute video contained dozens of other fun facts from the past season and predictions for an upcoming slate of playoff games. With her encyclopedic knowledge of professional football, Frelund has earned a reputation around the NFL Network for being intelligent and hardworking, said Steve Mariucci, a former NFL head coach who works as an analyst for the NFL Network. “What she does is different than anybody in television,” Mariucci said. “She’s doing something unique, something that none of us do.”

To make predictions, Frelund’s data model runs one million simulations of each game. The model crunches years of historical data from when teams with similar traits have played each other in the past—for instance, how certain types of offenses have fared against certain types of defenses—then projects what is likely to happen in an upcoming game. Frelund uses the results to predict not just which team will win, but also what the score will be and how individual players will perform. And she has an enviable record. During the 2024 season, she correctly predicted the winner of NFL games 71.7 percent of the time.

As the games are being played, Frelund’s model “watches” them using a form of AI that allows computers to interpret information from video. The model flags any play where what happened was different from what the model had predicted. “After every snap, you can see if the play is following what would be expected based on running lots of simulations,” Frelund explained. “If it’s bucking the trend, you can start to dig into why.” Frelund often calls coaches to ask about what happened. “I look for patterns, that’s all analytics is,” she said. “So it really stands out for me when someone deviates from a pattern.” 

Given how important the model is to her work, it’s understandable that Frelund doesn’t trust anyone else to use it. “I don’t know how I would teach someone else how to use it at this point,” she said. “It’s not beautiful, I’m not a front-end developer. It’s like my own mouse trap that I live in.”

Frelund’s success is even more impressive when you consider that she stumbled into her career almost by accident. She started out working in finance, and didn’t make her first sports television appearance until she was thirty-one years old. “It’s just not a normal path,” she said. “For people who want to do what I do, this is not the way I would recommend doing it at all.”

Frelund’s love of football started young. Growing up in East Lansing, Michigan, home of Michigan State University, she often attended football tailgates on campus or drove to Pontiac with her father to watch their beloved Detroit Lions play. When she wasn’t enjoying football, she was excelling in school. In fact, she began taking math and psychology classes at Michigan State when she was just fifteen.

Frelund arrived at BC in the fall of 2001, and during orientation she met Mathias Kiwanuka ’05, who would go on to become one of the greatest football players in BC history and to win two Super Bowls with the New York Giants. Kiwanuka and Frelund bonded over being from the Midwest, and remain close to this day. “She’s one of those people who’s just always one hundred percent reliable. She’s going to answer her phone, she’s going to go the extra mile,” Kiwanuka said. “And socially, she’s really somebody who can fit in in any room.”

After graduating in 2005, Frelund, who’d always planned on becoming a doctor, enrolled at the Illinois College of Optometry. But after a few months, she realized that medicine wasn’t for her. So she left the program and took a job as a financial analyst at a Chicago private equity firm.

In 2008, Frelund enrolled in business school at the University of Chicago. It was there that she had two experiences that would change the trajectory of her life. The first began with an email. “As cocky business school students do, I cold emailed the CFO of the NFL at the time,” she recalled. “Like, what was I doing?” But her boldness paid off. That CFO was Anthony Noto, a leader in the field of equity research. Noto helped Frelund secure a summer internship in finance and strategy at the NFL, which introduced her to the field of data science and got her interested in coding. Toward the end of the internship, however, came Frelund’s second pivotal experience. She began having health issues, which led to the shocking discovery that she had ovarian cancer, at the age of twenty-six. Her illness forced her to suspend her graduate studies, and she spent the next two years in treatment and eventual recovery. “It’s really helped me see that things are going to happen and you can’t control any of them,” she said. “But what you can find peace in is your reaction to them. There’s spirituality in that.” Frelund focused her attention in the midst of the illness on building her data model. “For me, it was about digging into something that made me feel happy and excited,” she said.

In 2010, Frelund took a job in business development with Disney and moved to California. Two years later, she moved to Connecticut for a job in technology development at the Disney subsidiary ESPN. Frelund worked on what was then referred to as big data. “Now we would call it more analytics, or data science, or maybe you’d call it AI,” she said. “I got to meld some of what I learned from coding, and kept all of my relationships in this predictive analytics world.” Frelund resumed her graduate school studies while working full-time, graduating in 2015 with both a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Science in Predictive Analytics from Northwestern University.

That same year, ESPN introduced a segment on its nightly SportsCenter broadcast that featured Frelund giving analytics-based fantasy football advice. But the turning point in her television career came the following year, when Paul DePodesta was hired as chief strategy officer by the Cleveland Browns. DePodesta was well known for his role, as depicted in the 2003 book Moneyball, in helping then–Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane use analytics to transform the club into a contender despite spending far less than other successful teams. Now DePodesta had been hired to apply the same concepts to an entirely different sport, and ESPN suddenly needed someone to explore how the whole thing would work in football. Frelund, with her deep background in data analysis, was well suited for the new role. “Analytics for football—what’s Moneyball for football?” she said. “They didn’t know how to talk about it on TV, so I gave it a shot.” Soon, Frelund was appearing regularly on SportsCenter, revealing how analytics applied to not only football, but also other sports, like basketball.

“I was awful on TV at the beginning—so rigid, I had to get over myself,” Frelund recalled. “But sometimes you just need to say yes.” She took improv comedy classes to look more natural on camera, and studied techniques to project her voice. Meanwhile, the use of analytics in football began to catch on, and approximately a year after making her on-air debut at ESPN, Frelund was recruited in 2016 by the NFL Network. The league had recently installed a system that collected data on player locations, speeds, and distances traveled. Frelund’s new job would be to tell stories using all that data.

Nearly a decade later, data analytics has transformed professional football, changing the way coaches understand how to win games and select the right players to help them do it.  

Frelund’s demanding job requires working long hours, including weekends, which means she sometimes misses important occasions with friends and family, especially during the football season. “It can be trying because I don’t really get to see a lot of other people,” she said. Her hobbies aren’t exactly relaxing, either. Frelund has run twenty-five marathons so far. (Her goal is to run one in every state.) She and her fiancé, Kyle Deombeleg, are also in the midst of planning their wedding, which will take place sometime before the 2025 football season. They hope to expand their family soon as well, and Frelund is currently undergoing IVF treatments. Looking ahead to potential motherhood, she said she doesn’t feel like it has to mean sacrificing her career. “ You can have everything,” she said, “you just can’t have it all at the same time.”

Then there are the challenges of being a woman in a field dominated by men. Frelund said that, through the years, she has heard the same sexist comment over and over again from men in her industry. “The number one thing people say when they meet me in person is, ‘Oh my God, you actually know football,’” she said. “At this point, I don’t really care.” She also has to deal with scrutiny, especially online, of her appearance, from the way her face looks to her body. “It doesn’t make you feel good when someone’s like, ‘you look really fat,’” she said. She credits therapy with helping her make peace with the more negative aspects of her job.

Frelund said that what keeps her motivated through all the hard work and occasional bumps is getting to be a part of something that unites people and brings them joy. In what other job, she wondered, would she get to experience a moment like last year’s NFL Draft? At the draft, she got to interview the legendary running back Barry Sanders, one of the greatest players in NFL history, who, of course, played for Frelund’s favorite team, the Detroit Lions. “I got to tell Barry Sanders in front of 350,000 viewers that for at least 75 percent of people in that draft room, he was the reason they became a football fan,” she said. Moments like that make her feel just as awed as she did at that first Super Bowl nearly a decade ago. “When you get to be a part of something that matters, it just means so much,” she said. “It’s hard to say how grateful I feel.” ◽