Optimal realignments of the teams in the National Football League

Saltzman, Robert M.; Bradford, Richard

doi:10.1016/0377-2217(96)00135-x

Cited by 18 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Saltzman and Bradford [31] modeled the NFL realignment problem as a modification of the quadratic assignment problem. They also proposed minimizing the sum of intradivisional travel distances.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Realignment in the National Football League: Did they do it right?

Mitchell¹

2003

Naval Research Logistics

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Abstract:The National Football League (NFL) in the United States expanded to 32 teams in 2002 with the addition of a team in Houston. At that point, the league was realigned into eight divisions, each containing four teams. We describe a branch-and-cut algorithm for minimizing the sum of intradivisional travel distances. We consider first the case where any team can be assigned to any division. We also consider imposing restrictions, such as aligning the AFC (American Football Conference) and the NFC (National Football Conference) separately or maintaining traditional rivalries. We show that the alignment chosen by the NFL does not minimize the sum of intradivisional travel distances, but that it is close to optimal for an alignment that aligns the NFC and AFC separately and imposes some additional restrictions.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Realignment in the National Football League: Did they do it right?

Mitchell¹

2003

Naval Research Logistics

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“…Yet others have examined ways of maximizing fairness: for example, Pollock (1974) investigated fair handicapping methods for golf; Wright (1992) devised fair sets of fixtures for an unbalanced cricket tournament, using local search techniques; Saltzman and Bradford (1996) considered both fairness and cost when examining alternative structures for an American Football league; and Percy (2007a) considered fair handicapping systems for disabled sports. McGarry (1998) examined the fairness or otherwise of various tournament designs, and Glickman (2008) used simulation to derive a method for ensuring that the best player in a knock-out tournament has the highest probability of winning the tournament.…”

Section: Other or Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

50 years of OR in sport

Wright

2009

Journal of the Operational Research Society

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This paper reviews about 50 years of activity in OR as applied to sports. After some history and an overview, including discussions of what we mean by sport and what we mean by OR, four themes are presented: tactics and strategy, scheduling, forecasting and 'other'. Within each theme many papers are discussed, showing the wide range of methods used and sports analysed. The issue is then raised of who our clients are and who they ought to be-it is suggested that not nearly enough is done for amateur sport. The paper ends with a conclusion and speculations about the next 50 years.

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“…Table 1 [3,4,5,6,8] is the comparison to the records of schedule problem. Figure 1 shows the system architecture, a web service is provided for assisting managers of sports games to optimize the matchup schedule.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intelligent Optimization Scheduling Algorithm for Professional Sports Games

Hung

Chien

Yen

2011

2011 Fourth International Conference on Ubi-Media Computing

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The world financial crisis has caused a great impact to human beings' daily life. The significant evidence is that the oil price has hit, more than, 90 U.S. according to the report of ministry of economic affairs. The price reflects the difficulty not only to transportation but finance status. In this paper, an optimization algorithm concerning the scheduling issues was proposed. The algorithm was revised in accordance with Tabu Search algorithm and Genetics algorithm. The purpose of this work is to reduce the travelling cost, simply achieve the least expenditures. The information of famous sports league (e.g. NBA) was adopted as preliminary experiment data. The travelling distances, according to the matchups of 2009 NBA games, were collected and obtained the straight-line distances from Google Map API. As a result, our method could reduce, at least, around 14,000 kilometers under 45,000 times mutation with the rate at 0.1%.

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Optimal realignments of the teams in the National Football League

Cited by 18 publications

References 5 publications

Realignment in the National Football League: Did they do it right?

Realignment in the National Football League: Did they do it right?

50 years of OR in sport

Intelligent Optimization Scheduling Algorithm for Professional Sports Games

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