BASKETBALL AI
Sponsored by Sherpa Sports
The Sports Intelligence Platform
Welcome Readers,
This edition opens inside the college front office, where Sherpa Sports AI turns Syracuse GM Greg Fahey’s "50 Thoughts" into one connected workflow. We also dig into a new survey showing nearly everyone in sports is buying AI, yet only 15% can prove it pays, and follow Google and OpenAI as they walk into college athletics.
Plus, there’s a new Season Starter Kit for small college staffs and four new reads in the Research Vault on what AI can actually see on the court, and where it still misses.
In this issue:
Integrating Front Office Operations: The Connected GM Workflow
AI in Sports 2026: Everyone’s Buying, Few Can Prove It Pays. What To Do?
Season Starter Kit: College Edition, Small Staff
Two of the Big Four Just Walked Into College Sports
Four New Research Reads, One Big Question: What Can AI Actually See?
Let’s Go
USE CASE
🧐 Integrating Front Office Operations: The Connected GM Workflow
Overview: Basketball front offices face extreme operational fragmentation, managing talent evaluation, NIL deals, roster compliance, and financial tracking across disconnected spreadsheets and email chains.
Inspired by Syracuse Men’s Basketball General Manager Greg Fahey’s "50 Thoughts" framework, Sherpa Sports AI unifies these core front office duties into a single connected platform. By bridging five fundamental buckets, recruiting, evaluating, money, agents, and branding, Sherpa translates raw staff criteria into structured, staff reviewed action plans.
When a program flags a roster need, Sherpa automates the heavy lifting while keeping human decision makers in control.
Recruiting & Evaluation: Maps target prospects, verifies coach and alumni networks, and generates sourced candidate packets highlighting key stats and evidence gaps.
Financials & NIL: Routes resource requests, drafts sponsor or donor briefs, and manages contract review tasks within compliance guardrails.
Agents & Representation: Surfaces verified agent representation, logs relationship history, and schedules required follow ups.
Branding: Coordinates program narratives, media pitches, and creator visits to maximize player and team visibility.
Rather than replacing judgment, Sherpa assembles intelligence, identifies existing staff connections, and routes visit checklists or contract workflows directly to assigned owners.
Why It Matters: Coaching and front office staffs waste hundreds of hours manually coordinating data across separate silos. Automating routine data assembly gives staff more time to focus on evaluation, strategy, and personal relationships. Because every AI output identifies underlying sources and data gaps, programs maintain total oversight over decisions, spending, and publishing.
Transform your front office execution today. Book a 20-minute workflow session at [email protected] or visit sherpasports.ai.
AI ROI
💵 AI in Sports 2026: Everyone’s Buying, Few Can Prove It Pays. What To Do?
Overview: A new Front Office Sports and Teamworks survey of more than 200 sports organizations (pro teams, leagues, college athletic departments and governing bodies) shows AI is spreading fast. But results are lagging. Nine in ten expect to use AI more over the next two to three years, yet only 15% can point to clear, measurable ROI.
Details: For basketball, the stakes are high. Teamworks reports it works with 87% of NBA teams, so the infrastructure is already in many buildings. The gap is in using it well.
Money is flowing: Nearly 80% are actively investing, and over three quarters raised AI spending last year.
Budgets are fuzzy: Only 24% have a dedicated AI budget and 29% don’t know how their AI is funded.
Where AI shows up: Data and analytics (73%) lead, followed by marketing (51%), operations (44%) and performance (43%).
Pros lead: 56% of North American pro teams have AI deployed, compared with 41% of college programs.
Data silos hurt: 40% of college users need four or more systems to evaluate a single athlete.
Why It Matters: The report identifies three traits shared by organizations that see real ROI.
They have a dedicated AI budget.
They have a named owner for the technology.
They keep athlete data in three or fewer connected systems.
Playbook for GMs and coaches:
Appoint an AI lead who owns adoption across scouting, performance and analytics.
Consolidate player data so that shot tracking, wearables, medical and video information feed one view of each player.
Fund AI on purpose with its own line item, not leftover software dollars.
Measure outcomes, such as minutes lost to injury, draft hit rate and scouting hours saved.
Set a usage policy; only 22% of colleges enforce one.
The payoff: faster roster decisions, healthier players and staff time shifted from spreadsheets to coaching.
NEW BAI GUIDE
🧰 Season Starter Kit: College Edition, Small Staff
Overview: This new College Coaches Season Starter Kit (Small Staff) Guide by Dan Barto offers a practical framework for basketball coaches with limited resources to systematically track player feedback throughout the season.
Details: Built for the coach who is also the ops director, the video coordinator and the van driver.
After practice, coaches record three minutes of spoken observations using their phone's voice recorder.
An AI assistant processes the transcript against saved project files to identify which players went unmentioned and provide concise one line summaries for those who were.
Crucially, the AI only maintains the count coaches must write and send every text message themselves.
To implement this workflow, coaches construct a structured AI project containing six core file types: roster.txt, how-i-coach.txt, schedule.txt, individual player profiles, and dated practice notes.
Why It Matters: In the grind of late season play, coaches naturally default to texting the same few players while quiet, steady contributors go unnoticed for weeks. This kit fixes that blind spot while protecting the authentic player coach dynamic.
[DOWNLOAD THE FREE BASKETBALL AI GUIDE NOW!]
FRONTIER AI IN COLLEGE SPORTS
🤖 Two of the Big Four Just Walked Into College Sports
Overview: Four companies define frontier AI: OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and xAI’s Grok. In October, two of them entered college athletics. Google Cloud became the official AI provider for Texas through the new Bevo Lab. Sherpa Sports AI, a front office platform already live at Power 5 schools, joined the OpenAI Partner Network. Anthropic and xAI have no college sports presence yet. That will not last.
Details:
Texas Bevo Lab (October 23)
25,000 square feet in Austin’s Innovation Tower. Google Cloud, Dell and SHI are founding partners; Gemini is the model.
Run by Kirk Goldsberry, the former Spurs VP of strategic research who built shot charts for Grantland and ran analytics for Team USA. This is a basketball mind building a 21-sport lab.
First proof came in football. Coaches now type questions to Gemini: how often does the opponent blitz on third and short, who do they target on third down. Google engineers automated the weekly opponent report, and Texas says that saved coaches more than 15 hours a week.
Basketball was already running. Transfer AI rates roughly 5,000 men’s and 5,000 women’s players and projects them against an SEC schedule. Sean Miller and Vic Schaefer use it. The same models inform revenue-share spending.
24 undergrads start with Google next week. Fully operational in 2027.
Sherpa Sports AI joins OpenAI Partner Network (October 6)
Sherpa unifies NIL, contracts, scouting, recruiting and finance on Azure. As a Partner Network member it will build OpenAI workflows into customers’ systems: searchable documents, automated reports, assistants trained on a department’s own knowledge, connected recruiting and roster data.
The Partner Network is OpenAI’s channel program, launched with $150M.
Why It Matters: Frontier AI companies now see college athletics as a market. Google is placing its model at the center of a 21 sport department, and OpenAI is reaching athletic departments through a partner already operating at Power 5 schools. The early uses, such as automated opponent reports, transfer portal projections and revenue share spending, are concrete and directly tied to winning and to managing money. Schools that build their data and workflows around one AI provider now will be hard to pull away later, so Anthropic and xAI face a closing window.
NEW RESEARCH SUMMARIES
💹 Four New Reads, One Big Question: What Can AI Actually See?
Overview: Four new summaries just landed in the Research Vault. Together they tackle a question every coach and front office should be asking: what does AI actually see, and where does it still miss? Each one is a quick read that ends with takeaways you can use right away.
Details:
Researchers paired wearable load data with box scores from Greece’s U16 championship. The players who covered more ground did win more quarters, but not by a reliable margin. The summary explains why effort only counts when it shows up in the stat sheet, and why adult targets don’t transfer to youth players.
Video AI tags made free throws easily. Steals and bad passes are a different story, because on video they look almost the same. If you’re shopping for a tagging vendor, read this one before you sign anything.
Top AI models read jersey numbers at 92% accuracy, yet they still can’t reliably tell you who took the shot. The fix is surprising, and it looks a lot like how a coaching staff divides up the work.
Shot blocking peaks early, while three-point volume keeps climbing into a player’s thirties. This new aging model forecasts each skill separately, and it even puts a number on Victor Wembanyama’s projected peak.
Your move: Pick the one closest to your role and click through. Each takes about 5 minutes to read. Then explore the rest of the Research Vault, where we break down the latest basketball AI research so you don't have to dig through the papers yourself.
🛠 Tools Spotlight:
Tools mentioned in this edition:
Sherpa Sports AI - AI-powered system so teams, agencies, and athletic departments can make faster, smarter decisions.
Teamworks - The operating system for sports.
NBA Digital Suite: "AskNBA" & Game Pulse - New enhanced digital experiences for the NBA 2026-27 season.
Research Vault - BAI research summaries and insights.
Basketball AI - Free website access to guides, tools, research, and more!
📰 Everything Else in Basketball AI
NBA Digital Suite: "AskNBA" & Game Pulse (Oct 19–20, 2026): The NBA officially launched its 2026–27 season digital ecosystem overhaul, powered by AWS Bedrock infrastructure. Key capabilities include:
AskNBA: A conversational natural language AI agent allowing users to query live and historical game telemetry, shot distributions, and defensive matchups on demand.
Game Pulse: An interactive live court visualization overlay that maps player spacing, ball trajectory, and real time expected field goal percentage (eFG}%) directly onto the mobile interface.
Multi-view Focus Mode: AI-assisted game navigation capable of processing up to four simultaneous live feeds while highlighting high leverage possessions,
📆 Upcoming Conferences & Events
SBJ Dealmakers & Media Innovators (New York, NY) November 18, 2026. Sports Business Journal's spotlight on tech investments, data valuation, and broadcasting technologies.
MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference - (Boston, MA),February 25 - 26, 2027. Thomas M. Menino Convention and Exhibition Center. Bringing together the leading figures in sports analytics, business, and technology.
📓 Latest Guides, Research Summaries & Reports:
Read Our Last Newsletter: Fix the Jumper, Weigh the Deal, Start the Season Right - October 13, 2026.
Latest Guides: (Update)
Latest Research Vault Summaries:
That’s a wrap for this edition. The next newsletter will be published Tuesday November 10, 2026.
Until next time, Terry and Dan.