OMAHA, NEBRASKA - MARCH 23: Head coach T. J. Otzelberger of the Iowa State Cyclones talks with his ... [+]
During the 2017-18 men’s college basketball season, Thomas Pollard had much more free time than usual. Pollard, a distance runner at Iowa State, had been diagnosed with a heart condition, causing him to take a break from the sport.
Instead of training and competing in races, Pollard poured himself into learning how to code and better understand the analytical side of basketball, the sport he always loved best growing up. At times that season, Pollard reached out to then-South Dakota State coach T.J. Otzelberger, whom Pollard had known since he was in elementary school and Otzelberger was an assistant at Iowa State. Pollard sent some reports on South Dakota State to Otzelberger.
Today, Pollard is still working with Otzelberger, albeit in a much closer, official capacity. Pollard is in his second season as the data analytics specialist for Iowa State’s men’s basketball team, whose head coach is Otzelberger.
On Thursday night, No. 2 seed Iowa State plays No. 3 seed Illinois in an East Region NCAA tournament Sweet 16 game in Boston. If the Cyclones win, they will advance to face either Connecticut or San Diego State in Iowa State’s first regional final since 2000.
Starting on Monday, Pollard began working on scouting and analytical reports on UConn and San Diego State, so he can provide them to Otzelberger and his staff immediately after the Illinois game in case the Cyclones win. Those reports, like the others Pollard now prepares, are much more detailed than the ones he completed when he was an undergraduate at Iowa State and Otzelberger was at South Dakota State.
“It was really elementary,” Pollard said of the work he did back then. “It really wasn’t anything crazy. I just started getting into it and sent him some things. I think that just planted a seed with him that that was something I was interested in.”
Pollard has always followed basketball. He started playing the sport when he was young and attended numerous games, including going to the Final Four every year starting in third grade with his father, Jamie, who has been Iowa State’s athletics director since 2005. Thomas Pollard remembers going to breakfast at the 2007 Final Four in Atlanta with his father and Otzelberger, who was then an assistant at Iowa State. He recalls thinking “T.J. was the coolest guy in the world outside of my Dad.”
Pollard continued playing basketball through his sophomore year at Gilbert High School. Pollard, who is now 5-foot-10, said he was always among the shortest kids in his class and knew he couldn’t play in college. At the same time, he was emerging as an elite distance runner.
Pollard qualified for the Foot Locker Nationals cross country meet as a junior and senior, finishing 12th and 13th, respectively. He also had the sixth-fastest outdoor 2-mile time in the nation as a senior.
Pollard received recruiting interest from numerous colleges and took official visits to Stanford and Oregon, two of the best distance programs. But he decided to stay home and attend Iowa State, which had some talented young runners. Back then, he was thinking about basketball, too.
“The Cyclones are going to be really good in the next several years under coach (Fred) Hoiberg,” Pollard told the MileSplit website in November 2014 when he committed to Iowa State. “I wanted to be a student at Iowa State so I could be a part of that success, especially if they get to the Final Four.”
After redshirting as a freshman, Pollard finished 45th overall and first on the team at the 2016 NCAA cross country championships as a sophomore. The next fall, Pollard began experiencing chest pain on a regular basis. He finished out the cross country season, placing 98th at the NCAA meet, and then went to the Mayo Clinic, where doctors diagnosed him with pericarditis, a swelling and irritation of the tissue surrounding the heart. Pollard had to rest and maintain a steady heart rate, so running was out of the picture.
As such, Pollard got more into Iowa State’s sports analytics club and prepared for his career outside of running. He was medically cleared to run again in the summer of 2018, but he sustained a few injuries and returned to run a few races during the 2019 track season.
By the fall of 2019, Pollard was back in shape. That semester, he worked on a statistics project with professor Dan Nettleton and developed a model to predict the results of the that year’s NCAA cross country championships. Pollard said he correctly predicted eight of the top 10 team placements, including Iowa State’s fourth-place finish.
“He’s clearly a bright kid who had a passion for sports and data,” Nettleton said. “Bringing those things together was just a natural thing for him to do. He’s talented in both those dimensions academically and athletically…He was certainly motivated to learn a lot about sports analytics.”
Pollard graduated in December 2019 with a 4.0 grade point average and undergraduate degrees in statistics and supply chain management. Still, he had eligibility remaining for track and cross country, so he remained in school and earned a masters of science degree in information systems in December 2021. After getting a clean bill of health following his heart condition, Pollard improved his times, including finishing 21st at the 2021 NCAA cross country meet and earning All-American honors.
“Coming out of that, I think it really just changed my mindset, just made me so much more appreciative for the opportunity I had to be a student athlete and just how precious that whole experience is,” he said. “I think just having so much more gratitude for what I got to do every single day really helped me ultimately get to where I got to in running. I don't know if I would have gotten there without having to go through all that adversity.”
When Pollard’s running eligibility ran out following the 2022 outdoor track season, he explored career opportunities in professional and college sports. He was open to any possibilities, as his father had preached to him numerous times. Jamie Pollard had worked for two years as a certified public accountant before getting into college athletics administration in 1989. Over the next 16 years, the elder Pollard worked at Saint Louis University, the University of Maryland and the University of Wisconsin before joining Iowa State as athletics director in 2005.
“Growing up, (his father) probably tried to push me away from working in sports,” Thomas Pollard said. “He'd always just told me, ‘If you want to work in sports, you’ve got to be willing to do anything anywhere at any time for no money.’ I think because of that, I was just very realistic about the odds of landing a job in sports and what's out there, what those opportunities look like. I was just really open to anything. I can’t even put into words how unbelievably lucky I got to get a job here at Iowa State.”
Since joining Otzelberger’s staff last season, Pollard has worked diligently on providing the coaches with data-rich reports on the Cyclones and their opponents but making sure they are easy to comprehend and relevant to what they’re trying to accomplish.
“(Otzelberger) understands a lot of that (analytical) stuff,” Pollard said. “But at the same time, he has a great balance of there's so much of a human element to it. We're really a daily habits program here. It’s all about just doing the same things every day and relying on your habits. We’re just very demanding with high standards in the program. All those things come first, but he definitely does utilize numbers, too.”
Spending the past two years around the program has made Pollard realize he would one day like to get into coaching. He enjoys the analytics part of basketball, but he is also learning the other aspects of the sport.
“The whole staff is just great,” Pollard said. “They do a great job and they really care about helping all the younger guys on staff learn and grow as coaches. The opportunities they give us, the trust they have in us, I couldn't be more grateful for how willing they've been and how much they really care about our development.”
He added: “I've got a lot to learn basketball-wise, but there’s a lot that translates from just running and being a competitor growing up. There's a lot that's similar. The basketball specifics and terminology, I’m just trying to pick that up from the guys on our staff.”
During games this season, Pollard sits in the middle of the bench next to Stevie Taylor, Iowa State’s assistant director of player development. He will be there again on Thursday night as the Cyclones (29-7) look to continue their impressive season, which includes a 28-point victory over top-seeded Houston in the Big 12 tournament championship game and the nation’s top defense, according to analyst Ken Pomeroy.
If Iowa State wins on Thursday and Saturday, it will advance to the Final Four for the second time in program history, joining the 1944 team. But back then, only eight teams made the NCAA tournament, meaning Iowa State won just one game in that tournament.
On Iowa State’s campus, students and faculty are overjoyed about the men’s basketball team, according to Nettleton, who last year co-authored a paper published in an academic journal that predicted who would have won the 2020 NCAA basketball tournament if it hadn’t been cancelled due to COVID-19. Nettleton didn’t run the model predicting this year’s national champion, although he is confident in the Cyclones yet knows the single-elimination event is somewhat of a crapshoot.
Bart Torvik, an independent analytics guru, has Iowa State with the fifth-best odds of winning the title (7.1%) behind Houston (26.3%), Connecticut (23.3%), Purdue (11.8%) and Arizona (8.6%).
“I feel reassured whenever I see (Pollard) on the bench,” said Nettleton, who played Division III basketball at Wartburg College in Iowa. “I think, ‘OK, we’re not going to get out-analyticed by the other team here. We got a good person in our corner who knows this stuff.’ I really feel good about that.”
