It was the middle of March 2020, and the Mississippi State staff gathered for what was supposed to be a meeting about the beginning of the second half of spring ball following their weeklong break. But, because it was the middle of March 2020, the meeting turned out to be about anything but spring football.
The university was shutting down, the late Mike Leach told his staff, and the coaches and players were being released to go their separate ways for indefinite amount of time. "If there was ever something you wanted to do but never had the time to do it," now's going to be your time," Leach said.
Leach uttered that piece of advice to a room full of people, but he was speaking to one defensive quality control coach in particular.
Jon Shalala was a few years into his career as a rising defensive assistant. A national champion quarterback at the NAIA level, Shalala was the offensive line and tight ends coach at Arizona Western College until a chance encounter with then-Tennessee defensive coordinator Bob Shoop brought him into the SEC.
Now entering his fifth year as an SEC support staff member, Shalala had grown familiar with the same frustrations of every coach to ever take a tour through the pay-your-dues grunt of being a graduate assistant or a quality control coach. He recalled charting plays by hand and drawing out Xs and Os on transparencies to put on an overhead projector during halftime of SEC games.
It was a lot of work, yes, but it was a lot of work to accomplish relatively little.
"It was a chaotic environment because if you wanted to go find something, somebody would have to go dig up that solution -- a tendency, what you're doing well or poorly from a statistic standpoint," he said. "There really wasn't a great system for it."
And so, in 2019, Shalala started building a spreadsheet. Over time, that spreadsheet grew for an Excel file into something more.
When Leach dismissed the staff, Shalala retreated to his hometown near Houston. When the campus re-opened in June, Shalala presented his work to that point to the entrepreneurship center at Mississippi State, who connected him with a computer programmer. By that point, Shalala had a beta version of what would become ANSRS.
"I was pretty amazed by it from the beginning," Zach Arnett, Mississippi State's defensive coordinator at the time, told me. "I told him to keep building it because he really had something."
Shalala continued coaching, even taking a promotion as Arkansas State's linebackers coach over the past three seasons. He left the staff to build ANSRS full-time in January.
"We created the fastest, most accurate data system in football that completely automates the breakdown process," ANSRS CEO Tim Prukop, also a former coach, told me. "No more hand-written charts, transparencies. We deliver data in real time so coaches can use it to better prepare for their opponents and find unique ways to attack them."
In layman's terms, ANSRS is a spreadsheet that thinks along with and ahead of a coaching staff.
The software comes pre-loaded with the 500-odd formations and personnel packages common to football, which ANSRS then formats into each team's terminology. From there, the user inputs the drive's starting point, the location of the ball (right hash, left hash, etc.), the personnel and 1-word name of the play. From that, ANSRS gleans the formation, the tight end placement, and dozens of other details. But a speedier, more accurate way to chart drives is just the faintest scratch of the surface.
"You build your own terminology into the system. It speaks the same language you do. It builds all your tendency reports, your hit charts, it can spit our formation pictures, all the analytics that are taking over football," Arnett said. "I really love it for the self-scout purposes. You're getting constant updates on, This is good for us vs. these formations and these sets, it's not so good against these sets, and it allows you to update your game plans as you go."
"You can pull up a formation and see every play they've run out of it, every defense you've run, and it's ready for you on Sunday morning," Gary Patterson told me. "I don't have to break down by hand that took me all Sunday and Monday night to be ready for a Tuesday practice. You want to get where you are not working on the breakdowns, you are working on the answers."
The deeper a staff digs into the details, the more information they'll find. And the more they build ANSRS into their workflow, the more useful it will become. Eventually, ANSRS could become an unseen but omnipresent member of the staff, a real life version of TARS from Interstellar.
ANSRS is built for each program, but also works well with software already in use. Here's how a simple practice script built in Google Sheets expands within ANSWRS.
From there, that data can be copy and pasted to pair with video already housed in Hudl.
"It's like it was designed for Allen High School," Allen (Texas) head coach Lee Wingington, ANSRS's first client, told me. "I was blown away at the speed and the amount of information you get. It's something that was really intriguing to a math mind like mine. How much time can this save? This will help us get information that we wouldn't have otherwise gotten."
Launched in January, ANSRS is approaching 20 clients, ranging from high schools, to the Power 4, to the NFL.
Prukop estimates ANSRS will shrink the time it takes to build a weekly scouting report from 25-to-30 hours a week down to 8-to-10. ANSRS believes it's the only data management system on the market built exclusively for football coaches, by football coaches.
But Shalala's mission for building the software stretches beyond filling a market need for a tool that spits out more detailed reports faster than the next guy's. Shalala built ANSRS for GAs and QCs to spend less time in data entry and more time coaching.
"I had to learn the skills I didn't learn as a QC and GA because I spent so much time doing breakdowns," Shalala said. "My mission became to automate that so they can focus on teaching their guys fundamentals and techniques rather than building reports."