About InsightGM

It started as a question.

Chris put it to his son Ryan: with rosters turning over like this, is there still an analytical way to value one?

It was a fair question. Everything available described last season, and under the transfer portal, last season’s roster is mostly gone. The tools that valued a team were all looking backward at a team that no longer existed.

Ryan’s response was, roughly, hold my beer.

What came out of it is InsightGM — a platform that projects how a college basketball roster will translate into a season, before anyone plays a game.

Two people who spent their careers being careful with numbers.

Neither of them is a basketball scout. That turns out to matter.

Chris spent 25 years in financial services, most of it as Chief Investment Officer — the person responsible for valuing a portfolio when the future is genuinely unknown, including through the 2008 financial crisis. He finished his career as President and Chief Operating Officer of the company, and remains active in the mutual fund industry today.

Ryan is a VP of Revenue Operations, and has spent fifteen years on the business side of professional and college sports — starting inside an NHL front office, then serving more than 120 professional teams, leagues and Division I athletic departments as their technology partner.

Between them, that’s a lot of years spent on one question: how much do you actually trust this projection, and how would you know if it were wrong?

Then college basketball turned into a market.

The transfer portal is a trading floor. NIL is price discovery. A roster is a portfolio that gets rebuilt every spring, and the people responsible for it have to make expensive decisions in April about a season that starts in November.

It wasn’t a basketball problem they recognized. It was a valuation under uncertainty problem — wearing a jersey.

So they built the instrument the original question was asking for: RQI, the Roster Quality Index. It projects a roster’s quality in efficiency terms before a single possession is played, it breaks that projection down player by player, and it can be re-run the moment the roster changes. Every Division I team, every night.

Why it’s built the way it is.

Both of them come from jobs where a wrong number had consequences — where you didn’t get to say the model felt right, and someone in the room was always going to ask how you knew.

That’s the habit the platform inherited. Every projection decomposes to the players that produced it, so you can see what’s driving it rather than take it on faith.

The part that isn’t about basketball at all.

Chris and Ryan have been going to games together for a long time — first as coach and player, later just as two people who wanted to be in the building. These days Ryan’s son Cooper comes along.

Three generations, same row of seats, and a question that got out of hand.

InsightGM is operated by Mountainbrook Labs LLC.