the NFL football draft and the knapsack problem

In this week’s Advanced Football Analytics podcast, Brian Burke talked about the knapsack problem and the NFL draft [Link]. I enjoyed it. Brian has a blog post explaining the concept of the knapsack problem as it relates to the NFL draft here here. The idea is that the draft is a capital budgeting problem for each team, where the team’s salary cap space is the knapsack budget, the potential players are the items, the players’ salaries against the cap are the item weights, and the players’ values (hard to estimate!) are the item rewards. Additional constraints are needed to ensure that all the positions are covered, otherwise the optimal solution returned might be a team with only quarterbacks and running backs. Brian talks a bit about analytics and estimating value. I’ll let you listen to the podcast to get to all the details.

During the podcast, Brian gave OR a shout out and added a side note about how knapsack problems are useful for a bunch of real applications and can be very difficult to solve in the real world (thanks!). I appreciated this aside, since sometimes cute applications of OR on small problem instances give the impression that our tools are trivial and silly. The reality is that optimization algorithms are incredibly powerful and have allowed us to solve incredibly difficult optimization problems.

Optimization has gotten sub-optimal coverage in the press lately. My Wisconsin colleagues Michael Ferris and Stephen Wright wrote a defense of optimization in response to an obnoxious anti-optimization article in the New York Times Magazine (“A sucker is optimized every minute.” Really?). Bill Cook, Nathan Brixius, and JF Puget wrote nice blog posts in response to coverage of a TSP road trip application that failed to touch on the bigger picture (TSP is useful for routing and gene sequencing, not just planning imaginary road trips!!). I didn’t write my own defense of optimization since Bill, Nathan, and JF did such a good job, but needless to say, I am with them (and with optimization) all the way. It’s frustrating when our field misses opportunities to market what we do.

If you enjoy podcasts, football, and analytics, I recommend the Advanced Football Analytics podcast that featured Virgil Carter, who published his groundbreaking football analytics research in Operations Research [Link].

Related posts:

• Will the New York Times Fourth Down Robot change football?
• Is integer programming the best tool in the OR/MS toolkit?
• In defense of model complexity
• How to find a football teams’s best mix of pass and run plays using game theory
• Why the Patriot’s decision to let the Giants score a touchdown makes sense