WCU Magazine Fall/Winter 2025

In a room ringed by video screens, the latest headlines and deadlines swiftly ticking by, Emily Badis M’17 stays cool and collected. The phone rings constantly — requests for trades of picks and players — as she crunches numbers and analyzes data to make the best recommendations, the clock ticks ever closer to zero. Then the spotlight is on and Roger Goodell, Commissioner of the National Football League, announces, “With the 24th pick in the 2025 NFL Draft, the Minnesota Vikings select Donovan Jackson, Guard, Ohio State.”

Badis grew up in Kennett Square and has fond memories of football Sundays with her whole family yelling at the TV. After she graduated from the University of Mary Washington in Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in math, her mother suggested she look at WCU for a graduate program. That’s when she found the master of science in applied statistics, noting, “The applied stats program has a speaker series I loved. I heard from speakers across industries from banking to big pharmaceuticals.” While Badis couldn’t see herself working in some of the industries she’d heard from, the series opened her eyes to the endless possibilities she’d have with her degree. After a little research, she found sports analytics. WCU was offering an undergraduate course in the subject and the professor agreed to let Badis audit the class. She was immediately taken with the field, and the rest is history. She landed a post-graduate internship with the Atlanta Falcons in football analytics. What started as a six-month internship turned into a three-season tenure in salary cap and contract negotiation analytics.

Today, Badis is entering her fifth season with the Minnesota Vikings and her second season as the senior manager of football administration. She’s involved in three main areas: contract negotiations, CBA and compliance, and salary cap management.

While the first rounds of the draft may get the most attention, her work really begins when those rounds end. Badis helps support the organization’s scouts in the undrafted free agency process by determining how much the team can spend on certain players and positions while maintaining their overall budget. She likes to call it “semi-organized chaos.” When that process ends, Badis puts the contracts together for the undrafted players and sends them out to agents — 21 contracts in a single night for the 2025 draft.

Badis knows she’s a bit of a unicorn in the NFL, and she doesn’t take her role lightly.

“For a lot of people, it’s hard to believe that something is possible without seeing it, so once there are women in those leadership positions, there’s a real tangible sense that it can be you. I’ve been fortunate enough to have so many great women come before and kick down those doors. That drives me to want to continue that legacy and continue to keep those doors knocked down for the next generation of women to come after me.

“Even if you don’t see someone who looks like you in the role you want to be in, it doesn’t mean it’s not possible. At the end of the day, there’s always a first.”