Zachary Mangum

Zachary is a software engineer with a math degree and an Alabama football habit that turn out to be the same interest, looked at three different ways. He studied Mathematics and Computer Science at Calhoun Community College and Athens State University - a strong academic record at both - and used his senior thesis to build a ranking-and-prediction algorithm for college football from scratch, instead of picking something safer. That algorithm, refined and rebuilt since, is the direct ancestor of the model running this app.

Since 2018 he's worked as a software engineer for defense-sector technology contractors in Huntsville, Alabama. The football side got its own outlet too: about two and a half years writing for Bama Hammer, part of the FanSided network, covering Alabama Crimson Tide athletics - including the site's single largest-viewership month ever, over a million total views. Agate is what happens when all of that lands in one place: a math background, real engineering experience, and a football fandom that never needed a good reason to keep arguing about who the fourth-best team in the country is.