A Team-Compatibility Decision Support System for the National Football League

Many factors are considered when making a hiring decision in the National Football League (NFL). One difficult decision that executives must make is who they will select in the offseason. Mathematical models can be developed to aid humans in their decision-making processes because these models are able to find hidden relationships within numeric data. This research proposes the Heuristic Evaluation of Artificially Replaced Teammates (HEART) methodology, which is a mathematical model that utilizes machine learning and statistical-based methodologies to aid managers with their hiring decisions. The goal of HEART is to determine expected and theoretical contribution values for a potential candidate, which represents a player’s ability to increase or decrease a team’s forecasted winning percentage. In order to validate the usefulness of the methodology, the results of a 2007 case study were presented to subject matter experts. After analyzing the survey results statistically, five of the eight decision-making categories were found to be “very useful” in terms of the information that the methodology provided.