The Sports Media Lab Student Spotlight profiles the lab’s seniors and their work. This spotlight is focused on Anthony Bamford '25, a media analytics major with minors in sport management and statistics.
Anthony Bamford ’25 has already conducted research projects for both the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) and the Major League Soccer club Charlotte FC.
He has experience with a variety of platforms including Excel, R, Tableau, Brandwatch, SEM Rush and Google Analytics.
While working as an intern for the Atlantic Coast Conference Football department during the 2023 season, Bamford witnessed first-hand the variability of college football game length.
While the ACC had some guesses as to what factors most influenced duration, they wanted to test those hunches with actual data. The task went to Bamford, someone who had been trusted with significant responsibilities and who Donald Moore, the ACC’s director of football, called “integral to our football department.”
Using a proprietary dataset (2019-2023) consisting of both in-conference and out-of-conference games, Bamford organized and cleaned the data before creating a regression model to understand the effects of total plays, scoring plays, penalties, replay stoppages, stoppage time and commercial format.
In August 2024, Bamford presented his results in person to the ACC. The findings both confirmed some of the ideas the conference had about game duration and gave them a few new concepts to think about, specifically in terms of replay stoppages.
In early 2024, Bamford and the rest of the Sports Media Lab team set up a partnership with Charlotte FC in order to help the soccer club better understand the social media habits and preferences of college students. The result was a multi-faceted project designed to assist the club with its social media strategy during global soccer tournaments such as the upcoming 2026 FIFA World Cup in North America.
Bamford’s portion of the research involves the social media tool Brandwatch. Using data collected during three big events–the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the 2024 Euro Championship and the 2024 Copa America–Bamford will assess and compare the paid, earned and owned social media mentions for Charlotte FC and its competitors. The metrics being assessed include information on demographics, reach, trends, sentiment and sources.
Bamford will combine his research with results from the rest of the Sports Media Lab team and will present the findings to Charlotte FC in early 2025.