Vassar, unlike some American colleges and universities, does not offer paths of study that focus on sports management, sports finance and sports marketing. Various departments offer classes related to sports—for example, ECON235: “Sports Economics”—but graduating from Vassar into a career in sports is not a natural progression. Jonathan Safir defied the odds on April 7, winning a national championship with the University of Florida men’s basketball team as the Director of Basketball Strategy and Analytics. In recent days, Safir was promoted to assistant coach and is reportedly under consideration for the general manager role at Florida.
As the Florida Gators cut down the net in San Antonio, securing their third national championship in program history, Safir had reached the peak of glory in collegiate men’s basketball. Last week on Monday, I spoke with Safir to hear more about his time at Vassar and path to winning a championship with Florida.
Jonathan Safir was always passionate about basketball, and knew that coming to Vassar would enable him to play the game at a competitive level while pursuing a rigorous course of study. Safir played on the men’s basketball team from 2011 to 2015 under coaches Del Harris and BJ Dunne. Safir remembers the team and community at Vassar to be special: “I loved my time at Vassar. I had an incredible group of friends, primarily on the basketball team, a couple on the baseball team.”
Perhaps the peak of Safir’s time as a Brewer was the team’s 2014 playoff push: “One of the highlights obviously, basketball-wise, was having at the time the best season in Vassar basketball history in 2014, advancing to the Liberty League conference finals where we lost in controversial fashion in overtime to Hobart.” Since Safir’s special season with the Brewers, the program has bloomed. Coach Ryan Mee took over the helm in 2018, and from that point on, the Brewers have added a Liberty League championship and an NCAA Tournament Appearance, both in 2021 and 2022.
At Vassar, Safir did everything he could to put himself in a position to succeed in sports analytics. He told The Miscellany News, “While at Vassar, I tried to shape [the classes] to be as much like me as I could to be like [the school], in terms of taking sports related classes.” Safir majored in economics and American studies, and worked with Professor William Hoynes and Hua Hsu to write his thesis, “How Analytics, Big Data, and Technology Have Impacted Basketball’s Quest to Maximize Efficiency and Optimization.” In the Acknowledgements section of Safir’s thesis, he discusses the hurdles with pursuing a course of study in sports analytics, citing how he considered having to create an Independent Study major before eventually switching paths and landing on American Studies.
In his thesis, Safir writes, “Basketball has intrigued me from the onset, because it is the consummate team game: teamwork, selflessness, camaraderie trump selfishness and individual play. That is an axiom that has been taught to me by my father from as early as I can remember.” As a part of a noteworthy Vassar basketball team, Safir already had a unique perspective on the game of basketball—less than four percent of high school basketball players go on to play in college. But his biggest contributions during his time at Vassar likely came off the court, in his thesis, where he spent 111 pages dissecting the role of statistics and analytics in every corner of today’s game of basketball, ranging from game-play to media coverage. As a 22-year-old, Safir was on the outside of the basketball analytics world, looking in. Just a decade later, he is assistant coach at the nation’s top Division I men’s basketball program.
Safir’s journey, however, was not linear. He spent time with two other basketball programs on both ends of the country—Columbia and San Francisco—before landing at Florida. After graduating from Vassar, Safir spent three years obtaining a Masters of Science in Sports Management from Columbia University. Under legendary Head Coach Kyle Smith, Safir was a Graduate Manager for the men’s basketball team for a year before Smith took a head coaching job at the San Francisco Dons. Faced with a fork in the road, Safir stuck around in New York. “I was halfway through my masters, and [Smith] said, ‘Look, you’re 22 years old, finish your masters, and if this job’s available out west, I’ll hire you.’ He was true to his word, and I stuck around and finished my masters [and then] when the job came up out West I became his director of basketball operations.”
Under Smith, the San Francisco Dons were thriving. But it is possible that the most important thing in basketball history to happen during those years at San Francisco was the budding of Safir and Todd Golden’s—who is now head coach at Florida—relationship. At the end of the 2018-2019 season, Smith took a job with Washington State following three consecutive 20-win seasons, and Assistant Coach Todd Golden was promoted to head coach and Safir was promoted to assistant coach. Safir explained, “[I] was fortunate enough to stick around when [Todd Golden] got the head coaching job and was eventually promoted to assistant coach and he and I have developed a really strong relationship, now I think it’s even stronger.”
Golden and Safir’s chemistry is evidenced by the immediate acceleration of San Francisco’s program. By the 2021-2022 season, the Dons went 24-10, earning their first NCAA tournament berth since 1998, ranking top-50 in the nation in both offensive and defensive efficiency. San Francisco entered the tournament as a 10 seed, but fell to a strong Murray State squad in the first round. Golden was offered the Florida head coaching job and Safir was a package deal with Golden, “A couple days later he got the Florida [head coach] job and I was the first one hired along with him and we’ve been here ever since.” He continued, “Somehow, someway, three years later we cut down the net in San Antonio.”
Safir came to Florida with Head Coach Todd Golden. In his first year with the Gators, Safir contributed to two top-25 wins and a postseason berth. Developing Florida’s men’s basketball program has not been an exact science, as Safir told me. Recruiting athletes required layers of evaluation, starting with looking at KenPom Offensive Rating Usage—a metric that measures against strength of opponent player efficiency against strength of schedule—rate stats and more. From there, Safir, Golden and the rest of the staff watch the players. Safir prides his team in gauging player compatibility: “One area that I think we excel at too, is not just using the numbers, but analyzing the film and being able to identify how a certain player will translate up a level is one of our special skills and we were fortunate in our team building and roster construction to make it all happen, almost to perfection this year. It’ll be hard to replicate.”
In light of Safir’s notoriety, he has not forgotten his roots, “Shoutout to Coach Dunne and Coach Mee. They were actually in San Antonio. I got to see them for a few minutes. [I appreciate] the support from the Vassar community and the Brewers, and I hope I can be the proud representative of my Alma Mater. I don’t want to forget my roots and Vassar’s played a big role in shaping who I am.”
Jonathan Safir’s success at the highest level in his field reflects all that Vassar College has to offer. Safir was a thriving student athlete who leveraged all the academic and extracurricular resources that the school provides.
The next chapter of Safir’s career is certainly bright. Just days ago, he was promoted to Todd Golden’s assistant coach and recent reports have Safir’s name in play for Florida men’s basketball’s next general manager. While Safir may doubt the Gators’ ability to build another roster as star-studded as this past year’s, Safir is just getting started in the game. In merely a decade, he went from a senior at Vassar, writing a thesis on the usage of analytics in basketball, to co-writing studies with the Ken Pom, winning a national championship and rising in the ranks to assistant coach. With the world of basketball in front of him, there is no telling where Jonathan Safir might go next.