ANN ARBOR — Dusty May liked what Jacob Kohn provided to the Michigan men’s basketball program last season so much that he decided to hire Kohn as a full-time staffer.
Kohn will be Michigan’s first director of basketball analytics. He started two weeks ago.
In this newly created role, Kohn will assist in all aspects of the program: recruiting, scouting, and NIL salary cap management. “The goal is to try and have numbers to support decision-making in as many things as possible that we can,” Kohn told MLive. “Anything that we could put numbers to using publicly available data sources, proprietary data, our own internal tagging, just trying to find numbers that can support decision-making.”
Kohn worked at the sports analytics firm Big League Advantage the past five years consulting for college basketball teams. Last season he was paired with Michigan, who’d hired the firm for the year. Over the summer, as Kohn was in a store getting fitted for a suit for a wedding, May called and offered a job on staff. Kohn jumped at the chance and relocated from Washington, D.C., to Ann Arbor.
“I hired him because he’s really good at analytics,” May said. “And he can build out a team at Michigan with all the quality candidates on campus and improve our processes.”
His exact responsibilities are still being determined but May made it clear that Kohn “will be involved in everything we do.”
Upon arrival, he got to work on the list of high school players Michigan was already recruiting. He’s crunched numbers to see if and how they fit what May is trying to do. He knows coaches are watching prospects (in person and through video); Kohn believes he can provide additional insights.
Kohn, who will turn 28 next week, graduated with a computer science degree from Duke. Unlike other analytics experts working in college basketball — May said “a lot” of teams employ one — Kohn can also write computer code.
He will assist in evaluating the thousands of players in the transfer portal, a major part of roster construction. Once the games begin — Michigan opens its regular season on Nov. 3 — “I might find things about our own play style that we could change or improve,” Kohn said. “We might find things we’re only doing 15 percent of the time are really working and we should try to do them more.”
May regularly referenced analytics last season, his first as Michigan’s head coach. When asked about timeout usage, for example, he cited a study that showed calling timeout solely to stop an opponent’s scoring run doesn’t always work. Michigan went 27-10, winning the Big Ten Tournament and reaching the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament.
Kohn realized last year that May was willing to ask analytical questions and listen to the feedback. That has continued since Kohn joined the staff full-time. “Dusty and everyone on the staff is extremely open to and curious about the analytics,” Kohn said. “But it’s not, ‘If the numbers say this, we’re automatically going to do this,’ which I think is good.”
It’s unclear whether Kohn will assist with real-time feedback during games. He said he is capable of providing such information if May wants. Once Kohn gets some baseline work done, he hopes to build a staff, perhaps utilizing interested undergrads, to assist his efforts.
Kohn grew up in Seattle watching the Sonics before they left for Oklahoma City. Isaiah Thomas’ buzzer-beater to lift Washington over Arizona in the Pac-12 Tournament championship is a core memory. Going to Duke only increased his passion for college hoops. (Michigan will play Duke this season, in D.C. no less.)
Now he’ll get a chance to be part of a college basketball team competing for championships. It’s why, as he was trying on suits and May called, he didn’t hesitate: “It was not a very difficult decision from a professional standpoint to come here.”
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