A new data warehouse being assembled by engineers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering promises to transform how the USC Trojans approach football strategy.
A decade of data, now searchable
The system will organize play‑by‑play results from the past ten years of FBS games into focused data marts, enabling analysts to compare trends across seasons, opponents, and eventually individual player performance.
Saloni Deepak Prabhu, a May 2025 chemical engineering master’s graduate, leads the technical work and data preparation, while Bruce Wilcox, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering practice, supervises the effort and aims to have the warehouse operational by the end of summer.
Conor McQuiston, director of football analytics for the Trojans, commissioned the project to give his staff the flexibility to test game plans and learn from past strategies, turning raw numbers into actionable insight on game day.
From raw numbers to game‑day insight
The warehouse eliminates manual data preparation, allowing analysts to focus on analysis rather than cleaning, and will initially cover play‑level results before expanding to detailed player breakdowns.
McQuiston notes that organized data enables natural experiments, revealing which strategies most effectively shift momentum, while the team’s rapid adaptation to American football — despite many members arriving from abroad — has been praised for its contextualized analytical approach.