Photo courtesy Tufts Athletics

By Kevin Duffy | MassLive.com

FOXBOROUGH — Bill Belichick's top priorities in the spring of 2015 included seeking reinforcements along the offensive line, finding an edge-setting defensive end and collecting veteran cornerbacks to help replace Darrelle Revis.

Belichick was also searching for an infusion of knowledge within his player personnel staff.

Shane Waldron, who worked five years in New England and spent the 2009 season as the tight ends coach, heard from within the organization that the Patriots desired a computer science whiz with an extensive football background.

Waldron, a Tufts University alum, contacted Jay Civetti, the Jumbos' football coach. Civetti returned with an immediate answer.

Yes, he knew a guy: Sean Harrington, class of 2014, fiery outside linebacker and creator of a software designed to alter the way football coaches at all levels approach their jobs.

This was perfect. Harrington grew up north of Boston, starred as a quarterback at Chelmsford High School, and once dominated a regional 7-on-7 tournament at Gillette Stadium, leading his squad to nationals.

Of course he'd want to work for the Patriots.

Except the Pats faced some unlikely competition.

Google had just offered Harrington a job, too.

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S/o to @seanharr11, former Jumbo fball Captain and Sr Software Engineer for the @Patriots. Sean guest lectured 2nite @TuftsEngineer #RollBos pic.twitter.com/cXo6p2OQR0 — Tufts Football 🐘 (@TuftsFootball) February 17, 2017

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Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the Patriots dynasty is the cast of characters surrounding Belichick, a quirky assemblage of football brainpower that has stayed a step ahead for decades.

Three coaches and three scouts hail from tiny John Carroll University in Ohio. So does Director of Player Personnel Nick Caserio, whose boundless energy spills onto the practice field, where he eagerly plays quarterback whenever he can.

Defensive coordinator Matt Patricia has a legendary beard and an aeronautical engineering degree. Ernie Adams, the team's longtime "football research director" and Belichick's childhood friend, is omnipresent. He often walks through the locker room during media availability, usually in a sweat-drenched gray T-shirt with a white towel draped over his shoulders.

Nobody talks to Adams. Despite all that has been written about him, no one, at least in the media, has a firm grasp on what he does. One former employee on Belichick's old Cleveland Browns staff believed Adams studied the tendencies of referees, among other responsibilities. Adams doesn't grant interviews, save for his epic appearances on the "Do Your Job" documentaries, which only amplify the mystique of the Patriots. We accept that he is a genius.

Adams left a job as an analyst and trader on Wall Street to join Belichick's Cleveland Browns in the early 90s, according to ESPN's Wright Thompson.

Nearly 30 years later, Sean Harrington turned down Google to join Belichick's Patriots.

Harrington holds the distinct job title of Senior Software Engineer in the Patriots player personnel department (which otherwise is comprised of pro and college scouts). Many teams employ analytics specialists or software developers. Based on a review of media guides across the NFL, Harrington is the only engineer working in player personnel in the entire league.

His name is buried deep in New England's digital media guide, on page 480. In the section listing the bios of almost every employee with an accompanying headshot, Harrington is nowhere to be found.

This, of course, is at the discretion of the team. Clubs can organize their staff directory however they wish. The Patriots said there was no reason for Harrington's exclusion, noting that one other personnel staffer — research director Richard Miller — has never had a bio.

Harrington was not made available for an interview, and neither was Bill Belichick. But Harrington clarified a few questions via e-mail.

On choosing the Patriots over Google, Harrington wrote, "It was a difficult decision, but I felt that I had an opportunity to make a larger impact working for the Patriots, along with aligning my passion for football with my profession as a Software Engineer."

So what exactly does he do?

On GitHub, an open-source website where developers around the world share ideas, Harrington wrote that he runs a "software team" for the Patriots, conducting "all sorts of Machine Learning and Analytics Jobs for the coaching staff, scouting department, training staff, and IT department."

Said Ben Leiken, a former classmate in the Tufts computer science department: "My understanding is that he's basically working on software tools that help with player evaluation. He's kind of changed the way they do things and increased the efficiency of their processes."

Harrington is particularly busy during NFL Draft season, his friends say. One childhood friend, Tom Szymanski — currently a coach at Trinity College — said Harrington works closely with Caserio. Harrington travels to Indianapolis for the NFL Combine each February and "gathers a lot of data on prospective draft guys," according to Tufts linebackers coach Randy Wright.

"I know he's heavily involved and talks a lot with coach Belichick," Wright said.

Ryan Pollock, a former Tufts running back/defensive back, believes Harrington holds a wide range of responsibility within the personnel department.

"He doesn't have a certain day-to-day task," Pollock said. "It's just, this is what we need done, and he's going to do it."

Other friends wonder exactly what Harrington's role entails.

"It's a little bit of a mystery," said ex-Tufts linebacker Matt McCormack. "What I know is the program (he created), so I assume it has something to do with that."

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Captains Sean Harrington (9) '14 and Tommy Meade (45) '15. Posted by Tufts Football on Monday, January 27, 2014

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At their house on College Ave. in Medford, Connor Glazier and Ryan Pollock could hear the tapping of the keyboard from the kitchen long after they turned in for the night.

Harrington was frequently up late during his Tufts days, coding a project that became his Senior Honors Thesis.

"He was pretty obsessed with it," Pollock said. "He thought it was going to change the world, I think."

Here's how it started: As a junior, Harrington watched his coaches spend substantial time each week diagramming the nuances of game film — "inputting data and taking down and distances and then putting it into our program and connecting it to the video," said Civetti. The whole process took upwards of 16 hours, Harrington estimated. He believed there must be a more efficient way.

So Harrington, a 6-foot-3, 220-pound strongside linebacker and one of the best all-around athletes on the Tufts roster, got cranking on an idea: a software that could identify and track players, and thus automatically record their alignment (the formation) and their movement (routes, coverages, etc.). The input would be the video; the output a play card.

For example, a post breaking at 7 yards by the 'X' receiver would not need to be dictated. The work would be done entirely by the software, allotting more time for coaches to focus on strategizing rather than collecting and transcribing data.

The concept was ambitious, but hey, this was Harrington. He was teeming with ideas and energy.

On the field, he was intense, "spastic," Civetti said with a laugh. Loved contact. A high school quarterback, Harrington converted to defense as a freshman and immediately earned playing time, first at safety, then linebacker. He'd smack his helmet after big plays.

"He was a yeller," Civetti said. "His voice always cracked."

Tufts suffered through a 31-game losing streak when Harrington played, but he helped steer the program in the right direction, said Civetti, who often invites Harrington to speak to the team.

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Away from football, well, Harrington had enough going on...

He worked for the Tufts Computational Biology Initiative, writing code and parsing "metabolite, gene and disease relationships from the human metabolome database," according the school's website. He worked a summer at the Harvard Medical School Research Computing Consultant Group. He spent time on a project that was essentially Uber for private jets, according to Pollock and Glazier (Harrington declined to confirm this).

He became engrossed in a side project during his senior year, teaming with student manager Michael Roubey to analyze massive amounts of data within Tufts' conference, the NESCAC. Together, Roubey and Harrington sought to determine the probabilities of scoring based on down and distance, yard line, and time remaining. The student manager and strongside 'backer created a statistical guide for the Tufts coaches when tasked with difficult decisions on fourth down. Roubey applied the algorithms. Harrington wrote a code that fed future NESCAC box scores into the program, so as to keep the numbers and probabilities constantly updated.

Roubey called Harrington "an awesome guy," citing Harrington's ability to connect with all types of people, from teammates to a student manager who had a keen interest in statistics but never played football at any level.

"Typical Massachusetts guy, got a bit of an accent, typical kind of football player stereotype," Leiken said. "You would have never guessed that, you know, he's brilliant."

"Wicked goofy," Wright recalled, "and if you figured out how smart he is you wouldn't believe it."

“He’s a guy you want to follow,” McCormack said. “He’s passionate, fun, gets along with almost everybody. And he’s a genius. Totally forgot to mention that.”

As a senior in the spring of 2014, Harrington hit "hyperdrive," as McCormack put it, with the football software project. He'd code in the library, furiously tapping his leg as classic rock blared from his headphones. He'd code plenty at home. He poured hundreds and hundreds of hours into the project. He was "kind of maniacal about it," Pollock said.

Working alone, he made remarkable progress. Glazier, a former Tufts offensive lineman who is now employed in the Artificial Intelligence space, said the software was built to the point where it could diagnose what was happening on film.

"Automation," Glazier said. "It basically tracks players and what drops they took and recognized defensive coverages."

It's unclear how advanced the software became, but Civetti noted that Harrington's program "cut a significant amount of time out of our daily grind to get all that information in that we needed."

"To be honest with you," Civetti said, "it was a little bit ahead of the time. ... The technology that is out there now, I don't know if they necessarily used his, but the idea kind of spread."

Possibly unbeknownst to Harrington, a small group of computer scientists at a University of Illinois research center based out of Singapore had been developing something similar around the same time. They presented their prototype, "AutoScout," at the 2014 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, touting 80 percent accuracy on play recognition.

Harrington eventually connected with AutoScout for a collaboration opportunity. According to Shaunak Ahuja, a co-founder of the company, Harrington's model "wasn't as far along" as AutoScout. Talks of joining forces fell through.

Harrington declined to say whether he continued building the software after graduation. He eventually transitioned to other projects and another job outside of football, friends say.

And then the Patriots called.

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Across the NFL, teams are perpetually racing to gather information, discover trends, probabilities, and underlying inefficiencies in opponents/players.

"It becomes difficult in a league that's so secretive to have any meaningful discussions between employees of different teams," said Roubey, who spent a year working for the Carolina Panthers after graduating from Tufts. "So we couldn't do much comparison, but we did think about how two people from a D-III school made it to the NFL."

This is especially true among those in technology or analytics. Most contacted for this story wanted nothing to do with it ("I'm not comfortable with this," one replied). Many were hesitant to share even the basic functions of their jobs, which range from database maintenance to software implementation to running statistical reports for coaches and scouts ("What's their run/pass rate out of '12' personnel?" another said as an example).

One football technology staffer estimated that there are about 20 "hardcore developers" across the league. It's a growing field.

What they're building remains under wraps.

At this point, it does not appear AutoScout — or anything similar to Harrington's project — has gained traction in the market (Ahuja sold the company and could not discuss its progress). Neither Pro Football Focus nor Hudl, two services that provide advanced stats and game analysis, use automation.

Could a NFL franchise privately work on such software? It's possible, said Carnegie Mellon sports statistician Ron Yurko.

"This can obviously provide a team great value, especially given the current limitations of accessing the tracking data," Yurko said. "I wouldn't be surprised if a smart NFL team was working on something like that."

Many teams have integrated tracking chips, placed in a player's shoulder pads, into their practices to collect data on workload and player fatigue. Some teams collect practice data from tags on the football, measuring the velocity of the quarterback's throws and identifying when a passer will suffer arm fatigue. Companies like Zebra Technology sell these services to NFL teams.

No question, there has been an explosion of data and technology within the league.

For the past four seasons, the NFL and Zebra have partnered to place tracking chips in the shoulder pads of players during games. This is how the NFL releases its "Next-Gen" stats -- top speed, acceleration, all that.

But, as Yurko indicated, access to player-tracking data from games is limited. Per league rules, clubs only have access to data from their own players. The league did not want to create an uneven playing field as "some teams become better equipped to process the figures," according to Sports Business Daily.

The story, written in August 2016, singles out the Patriots as a team that is "out front with their data work." This is no secret, despite Belichick's feigned aversion to technology and analytics (possibly his best comedic material). They're exceptionally well equipped.

Belichick is a football mastermind, yes, but he has consistently surrounded himself with brilliance -- from Adams, whom he met in high school, to Patricia, who blindly sent a resume, to Caserio, who was part of the John Carroll pipeline.

Belichick didn't have to go far to find Harrington, who three years removed from the Tufts dorms is doing his part to keep the Pats rolling with machine-like efficiency.

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Related Video: Kevin Duffy on Sean Harrington