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:
Jeff Ohlmann is an associate professor in the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business. Ohlmann received a Ph.D. and M.S. in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan, and a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Nebraska. His research analyzes decision-making problems in logistics, fleet management, agriculture and sports. A firm believer that you should “practice what you teach,” Jeff has collaborated with companies such as Transfreight, Cargill, LeanCor and the Cincinnati Bengals on research projects requiring mathematical modeling and the development of solution approaches. His work has appeared in well-respected academic journals such as the Mathematics of Operations Research, Transportation Science, Interfaces and several others. His research has been mentioned in the popular press in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, BusinessWeek and The Christian Science Monitor.