Students and recent alumni from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering are developing a comprehensive analytics database for USC Football that will help coaches and analysts evaluate strategies, identify trends and prepare for opponents.

The project brings together play-level data from thousands of Football Bowl Subdivision games in a searchable data warehouse. The system is intended to make it easier for USC Football analysts to compare seasons and opponents, test ideas and eventually examine individual player performance alongside play-by-play results.

Every college football game generates data on plays, formations, tackles, touchdowns, penalties and other aspects of competition. Organizing years of that information into a usable format can allow analysts to spend less time preparing data and more time examining patterns that could inform decisions.

Bruce Wilcox, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering practice at USC Viterbi, assembled the team at the beginning of the spring semester.

“I’m just astounded at the amount of data that’s collected,” Wilcox said. “We hope, by the end of the summer, to have that first data warehouse operating.”

Saloni Deepak Prabhu, who earned a master’s degree in chemical engineering from USC in 2025, leads the project’s day-to-day technical work. Prabhu previously took Wilcox’s data-focused coursework, joined his research group and later joined the industrial and systems engineering department.

“We are building a data warehouse so the analysts can get direct access to well-modeled structured data, so that they can spend time on their analysis and the time spent on preparing the data is eliminated altogether,” Prabhu said.

USC Football Director of Football Analytics Conor McQuiston commissioned the project. He said having a large collection of organized data will allow his department to examine strategies used throughout college football and determine which approaches have produced results.

“So many different teams have tried so many different things that just having access to all this data lets us run natural experiments,” McQuiston said. “What has and hasn’t worked, and what can we learn from that?”

The team aims to have the first version of the data warehouse operating by the end of summer.

For information, visit usc.edu.