All major sports leagues in the United States allocate new players to teams through some form of a sports draft. Sports drafts are big business and big media events. The top picks in these drafts will earn tens of millions of dollars and can immediately impact the ability of the franchise to win games. The NFL draft was watched by more television viewers in 2010 than the NBA playoffs. Yet, for all the attention and the obvious impact on franchise success, sports drafts have not been well studied. In this presentation, we examine the use of analytics to model and analyze sports drafts. We will consider both the player evaluation and the draft execution phases of a sports draft. We will present an overview of both our own research and other leading research in this area to illustrate the challenges of modeling this process and the failings of current drafting methods. We will touch on several different sports, including baseball and football, as well as both real and fantasy sports drafts.

Speaker's Bio:

Brian Kopp joined STATS in 2008 as the head of strategic planning and development. In this role, Mr. Kopp is responsible for the company's global strategy, which includes new business initiatives and new product development. He also leads and participates in various corporate development transactions such as acquisitions, investments and strategic partnerships. Throughout his career, Mr. Kopp has held strategy and development positions for a variety of growth-oriented companies. Most recently he served as senior director of strategic planning for Career Education, one of the world's largest for-profit education companies. Previously he was manager of corporate development for NAVTEQ Corporation, the world's leading digital map data provider. Mr. Kopp began his career in private equity with Svoboda, Collins LLC and investment banking with Merrill Lynch. Mr. Kopp received his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and his BA in Economics from Wabash College.