Paul DePodesta

“I have a little experience in doing things that are unpopular.”

“There are certain times when you see a guy, and you say, 'He's a big-leaguer.'”

“Medicine is so big and so important.”

“It's one thing to be able to analyze something. It's another to implement it or execute on a vision or even to get a whole bunch of people to rally behind it.”

“Circumstances change and you have to be proactive about changing with those circumstances.”

“I was well aware of my limitations as a football player and knew that I needed every edge I could possibly get in order to compete. A big part of that was to be as precise as I could and make as few mistakes as possible because I figured that was the only way I could survive.”

“We have to make judgments on the individual players and we're not always going to be right.”

“In a given year, there may be two or three NFL-ready quarterbacks at the college level. In another year, there literally may be zero.”

“If you have to remind people you're the boss, I don't think you're going to be a very effective leader.”

“There are a lot of parallels between being a mutual fund manager and being a general manager. Both in the financial markets and in baseball, we're dealing with a world where uncertainty reigns. We're trying to predict the future performance of human beings. It's a fundamental difficulty for which we both have to account.”

“There probably isn't another position in all of team sports that I can think of that has the same level of import as the quarterback.”

“Are there things you can do with the rest of your personnel or are things you can do schematically to help a quarterback? I think so. But at the end of the day, that quarterback still has to be a driving force of your team, especially if you want to be a consistent winner over time.”

“I really focus on process as much as anything else: process for how we evaluate players, process for how we make decisions, process even for how we hire people internally, process for how we go about integrating our scouting reports with guys watching tape in the office.”

“As the West Coast offense has spread out among the NFL, as all of Bill Walsh's assistants and all of Mike Holmgren's assistants have gone on to be head coaches, it's all the West Coast offense, but it's all a little different, tailored to the personnel or the coordinators or the resources each team has.”

“That's sort of my mindset, more than anything else, whenever I get into anything new. I'm in this constant pursuit for new knowledge. I think I sometimes focus more on all the things that I don't know and what I'm trying to figure out.”

“Analytics is not about sitting behind a computer and pushing enter and having it produce an answer.”