Can artificial intelligence help us understand racial bias in sports?

The 2019 NFL season quickly evolved into the Lamar Jackson show, every week delivering a different story, usually involving a highlight touchdown, a gaudy stat line, or a charming news conference. One story, however, was different: following a San Francisco 49ers loss at the hands of Jackson's Baltimore Ravens on Dec. 1, Tim Ryan, the radio color analyst for the 49ers, suggested that Jackson was successful in part because his dark skin helped him disguise a dark football. The public backlash was swift and loud, even if the fallout was mild (Ryan was suspended for one game). Instead of an honest conversation about why we talk about certain athletes using racialized language, the sports world settled for an apology and the next news story in the cycle. It is society's inability to adequately address issues of race and bias that motivated Mohit Iyyer, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, to apply artificial intelligence and "big data" analytics toward answering a central question: Do sports commentators demonstrate bias in how they discuss athletes from different racial backgrounds?