TeamRankings.com
Get Smart About Sports
We’re proud of the team we’ve assembled at Team Rankings, from our current employees and advisors to past contributors who helped our company grow and thrive. Although we all live and work in different places, we share a passion for working hard, learning quickly, and building great products.
Just as importantly, we don’t take ourselves too seriously, unless the topic of conversation is whether the pizza in Boston is any good. In that case, our views are fiercely divided and fisticuffs may ensue.
Here’s our squad, in chronological order from veterans to rookies:
Founder and LLC Manager
Rookie Year: 2000
The dude that started it all. Mike’s interest in building quantitative sports power ratings began in 1997, at the tender age of 19. After teaching himself enough about computer programming to build a basic web site, he launched the original TeamRankings.com from his dorm room in 2000. The site set a new standard for incredibly slick web design.
Back when the term “Moneyball” was still just a twinkle in Michael Lewis’ eye, Mike’s highly sophisticated (for the time), 100% data-driven ratings quickly achieved national prominence, especially in college basketball. In March 2001, Sports Illustrated magazine even profiled Mike in a feature on March Madness bracket picking. If you’re old enough to understand how big of a deal that used to be, we salute you!
After a numbers-obsessed youth in which he memorized 36 significant digits of Pi, Mike broke West from Philadelphia to earn a BS degree in Mathematical and Computational Science from Stanford. During his career he has worked in analytical roles at PayPal and LinkedIn and founded several technology startups in Silicon Valley, including Circle Of Moms (acquired in 2012) and most recently Change Research, where he serves as CEO.
Since Tom came on board in the mid-2000’s, Mike has primarily served as a part-time advisor to Team Rankings in the areas of analytics and strategy. (Just don’t ask him about Tom’s decision to stop calling the site “Mike Greenfield's Team Rankings,” because it touches a nerve.) However, Mike occasionally still gets his hands dirty with some modeling or coding work, especially if it involves the NCAA basketball tournament. Despite clearly being wrong, Mike also insists you call the third-to-last round of March Madness the “Crazy Eight.”
Co-Founder and CEO
Rookie Year: 2004
Tom’s interest in the statistical side of sports sprouted back in the late 1980s, when he spent his weekends as a Strat-O-Matic Fanatic and his nights trying to get Euler to pitch a perfect game on the Commodore 64. After ditching the frigid climes of Boston for college in sunny California, he earned a BS and MS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford.
Serving as a Resident Assistant in Branner Hall during his junior year, one of Tom’s jobs was to discourage 18-year-old freshmen experiencing their first taste of freedom from engaging in Animal House style behavior. Mike Greenfield and Matt Koidin were both living in the dorm. Mike was not a problem.
After working in product and marketing roles at a Silicon Valley startup, Capital One Financial, and Stanford Business School, Tom was looking to do something more entrepreneurial when he ran into Mike outside the Palo Alto post office one sunny day in late 2004. He soon asked the fateful question, “So whatever happened to that sports web site you built for fun?”
Tom put in the work to help get Team Rankings off the ground as a full-time business, and within a few years Mike anointed him as CEO. Nearly 20 years later, Tom still hasn’t gotten a promotion. He does a little bit of everything (except writing code, although learning SQL has been on his to-do list for eons now), but primarily focuses on building the team, counting the beans, and setting product and marketing strategy.
Partner and Technical Advisor
Rookie Year: 2006
Matt was the first super hard core sports fan on the Team Rankings team (as opposed to primarily being a nerd who also happened to like sports). Not content to only geek out over prediction model design and hypothesis testing, Matt always found the time to do things like read articles about his favorite teams on ESPN and attend sporting events for fun. Perhaps his biggest sports fan badge of honor, though, is the fact that Matt plays in five fantasy football leagues—which used to sound impressive until we hired Seth.
Like Tom, Matt fled the Boston suburbs for college life in Palo Alto. Unlike Tom, Matt hails from the decidedly more townie North Shore (cue the thick Boston accents), and over the years Matt has done a much better job maintaining his Beantown sports cred. After graduating from Stanford with a BS in Computer Science, Matt co-founded Justarrive, the first e-ticketing platform for college and professional sports teams. He went on to earn his MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, after which he served as a Manager in the Strategy and Operations group of Deloitte Consulting.
Looking to get back into tech, Matt reconnected with Mike and Tom and became both a partner in Team Rankings and our first full-time software engineer, serving in that role from 2008 until 2011. He then joined the founding team of Pocket, (acquired by Mozilla), serving as CTO, General Manager, and finally CEO. Most recently, Matt stepped back into the sports world as CTO of BreakAway Data, a platform focused on providing athletes with personal health and performance data.
Today, Matt advises Team Rankings on a variety of technical and strategic matters, explains the outdated spaghetti code he wrote back in the mid-2000’s to our current engineers as needed, and still occasionally gets his hands dirty helping manage our server infrastructure.
Engineering and Data Science
Rookie Year: 2011
David’s earliest nerd cred, besides his irrational love for sweatpants, was mastering ten key typing in the sixth grade. That proficiency developed because he, like Tom, was a Hardball aficionado—although David had the far superior PC version. David spent a good portion of his youth entering custom baseball player stats into the game with his brother, until a further epiphany (winning his Dad’s NCAA tournament bracket pool at age 12) made him realize that you could actually make money with sports knowledge.
After picking up an undergrad degree at Johns Hopkins, David went on to earn his MS in neuroscience at NYU, during which time he co-founded the now-defunct HackTheBracket.com. While working as a data analyst for tech company Inuvo, he then started the also now-defunct college basketball blog The Audacity Of Hoops in his spare time. His hidden agenda was to use numbers to prove that the Kansas Jayhawks were, are, and forever will be the best college basketball team in the universe.
David’s innovative analysis and defensive charting caught the eye of the Team Rankings crew, who happened to make contact with David just after his cross-country move to San Diego, which greatly suited his craft beer-loving tendencies. David started off doing some writing and social media, but quickly taught himself to code when the need arose.
Today, David is a quantitative and technical jack of all trades at Team Rankings, updating our sites, implementing new product features, building and refining data models, and conducting ad-hoc analyses. We have yet to find a sports prediction contest for money (or burritos) that David is not interested in entering, and it is almost always negative EV to compete against him.
Engineering and Operations
Rookie Year: 2011
Like Tom, Matt, and Mike, Jon is yet another East Coaster; apparently the fear of cold brings us together. He grew up in New Hampshire, and as a die-hard Celtics fan in the Bird / McHale / Parish era, he once cut out every single Celtics article appearing in the Boston Globe for an entire year and hung them on the wall of his bedroom.
Jon also made his way to the Golden State for college, earning a BA in Psychology at Stanford. There, his illustrious collegiate sports career included playing on the women’s basketball team practice squad, a brief stint on the club table tennis team, and possibly the shortest tenure ever as a cross country team walk-on (it can be measured in hours).
Jon later picked up a Master’s degree in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason, before returning to the Bay Area in his classic Volkswagen camper van that eventually burst into flames on the side of a Santa Cruz highway. (Thankfully Jon escaped first.) When Jon’s not doing technical work, he’s deftly diffusing any escalating tensions that arise from internal discussions about Boston pizza.
At some point during a college reunion pickup basketball game (fun fact: Jon’s vertical leap is
Marketing and Operations
Rookie Year: 2015
Seth became a fantasy baseball nerd at age 12, and the number of leagues he participates in seems to increase by the day. He started writing about fantasy sports soon after his obsession began, then parlayed his passion into marketing and editorial roles for FOX Sports, Sporting News, NBC Sports/Rotoworld, and others.
Among his fantasy baseball accolades, Seth was the winner of the renowned Tout Wars Fantasy Baseball Experts League in both 2016 and 2023. For his initial victory, a delicious kosher hot dog was briefly named after him (it’s a long story).
Seth is a St. Louis born and bred Mizzou alum, Norm Stewart devotee, and diehard Kansas City Chiefs fan—but you shouldn’t hold those things against him. When he’s not scarfing down Provel slathered Imo’s Pizza, toasted ravioli, and clown cones from Baskin-Robbins, he’s likely wrangling with his shih tzu duo, Bruno Mars and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In 2015, Seth emailed Team Rankings a 21-page list of marketing recommendations (a deliverable that was once quite impressive, in the pre-ChatGPT era), and that effort earned him the opportunity to prove himself. Today, Seth manages our email marketing, runs customer support, and leads CRM and customer engagement projects. If you’ve ever sent us a support email, you’re probably already virtual pen pals with him.
Analysis and Content
Rookie Year: 2019
Jason grew up in Kansas City, where one of his earliest sports geek moments was attending the NCAA men’s basketball Final Four practices in 1988, and devouring the media guide until he had memorized every single historical Final Four bracket. He also reminds you that Irwin Dambrot was the Most Outstanding Player of the 1950 NCAA tournament, in case you forgot.
Jason did not become a Kansas fan that fateful year, though, having already fallen in love with Derrick Chievous’ band-aid. Consequently, he went on to attend the University of Missouri and earn his BS in Biology. While at Mizzou, Jason spent his free time developing college football power ratings, scribbling bracketology notes, and working for the football team’s video staff.
(To this day, Jason swears that he sketched out early ideas for what is now the spread offense after filming his Tigers gain exactly one first down against Kevin Hardy and Simeon Rice’s Illinois team in 1994. Although he looks not unlike Kliff Kingsbury, Jason’s self-professed brilliance for offensive scheming still hasn’t gotten him an NFL head coaching job.)
After college, Jason attended law school at the University of Houston, where he mainly spent his time in the key role of office pool administrator for the student body. He never relinquished his obsession with analyzing sports, and soon began writing blog posts for Pro Football Reference. Eventually, he became a full-time NFL writer and managing editor for the website The Big Lead, thus becoming yet another former lawyer turned sportswriter.
Today, Jason serves as an analyst, content creator, and subscriber liaison for both pools and sports betting, and works with our engineering team to design and refine data models. He revels in spelunking his way through data sets and trying his best to disprove conventional sports wisdom.
Operations and Partnerships
Rookie Year: 2024
As a little kid growing up in the Minneapolis area, Brock’s early obsession with orderly operations and continuous improvement meant that even video games couldn’t escape a detailed annual review and refinement. Every fall in the early 2000s, he would spend hours entering player names from college preview magazines into NCAA Football for Playstation to bring every roster up to date. By age 12, Brock was already organizing NFL pick’em and March Madness bracket contests for his 5th grade class, with big prize pots of Capri Suns and Lunchables on the line.
After earning a degree in sports management and building his network in college and professional sports, Brock taught at multiple universities before moving into administrative leadership positions in the education world. When sports paused during the pandemic, Brock took the opportunity to start building his own sports betting models, which gave him a deeper appreciation for the data and objective analysis that Team Rankings provides.
During the interview process, Brock made it clear how Team Rankings would benefit from his talents as a five-tool player: organizational skills, leadership experience, passion for sports betting and pools, user-level knowledge of our products, and personal motivation to compete and win in business. Today, he focuses on driving operational excellence and strategic growth, including partnerships that extend the company’s reach and influence. “Win the day” is Brock’s motto, and it’s tattooed in huge red letters across his chest. (Just kidding about the tattoo part.)
As with any Minnesota sports fan, Brock has endured a lifetime of heartbreak, and has resigned himself to patiently await the next big calamity in Minnesota sports history.
Betting Consultant
Rookie Year: 2019 • Retired: 2020
Gavin hails from County Cheshire in the north west of England, just a stone’s throw from the Top Of The Hill Chip Shop. If you’re unfamiliar with the area, Cheshire is the county bordering Derbyshire to the east, Staffordshire and Shropshire to the south, and Flintshire to the west. If you still need help placing it, please ask any Hobbits you happen to know.
Gavin grew up an athletic tot who so fancied having a punt on the footie that he made a career out of it. After university he began his career in a management training program at Bet365, one of the world’s largest online betting operators. Since then, he has held management roles for leading affiliate marketing companies in the gambling industry including Catena Media and Gambling.com Group. As an entrepreneur himself, Gavin has even had a stint running his own online casino and currently manages a sports betting tip site called whatacca.com as a side hustle. (For the Americans out there: “Acca” means “parlay” in the non-Queen’s English.)
After the repeal of PASPA in 2018, Gavin consulted with Team Rankings to help teach us the ropes of the sports betting affiliate marketing business, and worked directly on operator partnership development and promotional strategies. Outside of work, he enjoys attempting to break his 17-year old cross country PR, composing LMFAO-style dance club bangers to launch his DJ career, and counting the days until Stoke City gets back in the Premier League.
Analytics Intern
Rookie Year: 2011 • Retired: 2014
Growing up a child of the college football BCS era and living ten minutes from Kinnick Stadium in Iowa City, Austin spent his formative years calculating BCS formulas on his own. He played some basketball in high school and even won back to back “most improved” awards on the swim team, yet still could not crack the varsity lineup.
With his hopes for the Olympics dashed, Austin detoured to Palo Alto to study physics at Stanford. Like Jon, he took his beatings as a member of the women's basketball team practice squad, then returned to his Midwest roots to pick up an MS in Aerospace Engineering at Purdue. That move also afforded him the opportunity to frequent McDonald's, Arby's, Taco Bell, and the rest of his beloved fast food establishments without getting the evil eye from kombucha chugging Californians.
After he took a class entitled “The Math of Sports” during his sophomore year, Austin decided the time had come to create a team power ratings system of his own. A year later, he traveled to Boston for an early iteration of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. There he met the Team Rankings crew, who could not believe that a college junior had paid his own way to fly across the country to attend. (That was in 2010; things are different now, and the Sloan conference is a beast.)
That chance meeting kicked off Austin's four-year run as TR's incessantly tardy yet brilliant and always entertaining student intern. During his tenure he designed and tested a new predictive ratings system, coded simulation models for our pool picks products and season projections, and blogged on groundbreaking topics such as our NBA Valentines. Today Austin is literally a rocket scientist, and making waves as a co-founder of Starfish Space after stints at Lockheed Martin and Blue Origin.
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