麻豆女演员

Maj. John David and Christian Nelms 鈥�18 consult just before Nelms鈥� SURI presentation June 23. 鈥� VMI Photo by Kelly Nye.

LEXINGTON, Va., June 23, 2016 -- Professional sports franchises are always trying to find an edge.

That鈥檚 why so many, particularly in Major League Baseball, have embraced a mathematical approach, applying analytics to player performance and spending money accordingly. It would be a good bet that none of them has every tried to do it using a video game, however.

Cadet Christian Nelms 鈥�18 and Maj. John David spent the first summer session taking baseball鈥檚 bent for analysis an applying it to the football field.  They crunched numbers and ran computer simulations to determine the value, or lack thereof, of certain positions on the football field. The approach was a little unorthodox, and the results have been surprising.

鈥淚n some sense, it鈥檚 the first study of this type at all,鈥� said David, an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics.

One of the advanced statistics sweeping the baseball world these days is Wins Above Replacement, which tries to determine, through a formula that encompasses all sorts of batting, fielding and pitching metrics, how much value a team would lose if a player had to be replaced in the lineup. After reading an article in The Journal of Sports Economics, Nelms decided he鈥檇 like to apply a similar metric to football. He pitched his idea to the Summer Undergraduate Research Institute, and, after receiving a SURI grant, began his unusual research.

鈥淢aj. David suggested it would be cool to do a project using a video game,鈥� said Nelms, one of two SURI researchers in the applied mathematics department this summer. 鈥淔rom there, I took the idea and ran with it.鈥�

That鈥檚 right. Nelms conducted his research using a video game, specifically the popular Madden football. Though the idea may sound far-fetched, it really isn鈥檛 that crazy.  The article from The Journal of Sports Economics tried to determine how valuable a position is to a football team; Nelms just took it a step further.

鈥淏asically, the project is using the video game to determine positional wins above replacement ratings in the NFL,鈥� said Nelms.

Inspiration struck, David said, as he was compiling his research on quarterbacks for a chapter he wrote for a sports analytics book that will be released in January.

鈥淚t kind of occurred to me that maybe this game, which is basically a computer simulation, might be able to tell us something that some of the other studies or data shortcomings [cannot],鈥� David said. 鈥淲ith this idea, what we could do is look at the value of each individual player.鈥�

During the first summer session, Nelms ran 1,250 simulations, analyzing five different positions on the football field: quarterback, running back, left tackle, linebacker, and cornerback. The simulations themselves took over 100 hours to complete.

Of course, the computer simulation he used is a video game, designed for entertainment and often far from representative of real life. The game, for example, couldn鈥檛 take into account intangibles that may affect the game or a player, but Nelms did his best to make his simulations as realistic as possible.

鈥淎t first, it was cartoonish,鈥� said David. 鈥淲e kind of tweaked the various settings of the game so that the numbers coming out of the season-long simulation matched the numbers of an actual season. We wanted to make it look as real as we could get it.鈥�

Because of time constraints, Nelms ran 10 simulations with a starting player at each position, then ran five more with a replacement. His results were surprising, and much different from the previous study.

鈥淭he biggest surprise we found was that the quarterback position influenced a lot fewer wins than we thought it would,鈥� Nelms explained. 鈥淩unning backs, on the other hand, were much more influential.鈥�

For example, Nelms found that the simulations determined that Marshawn Lynch, a running back for the Seattle Seahawks, was worth between 1.8 and 4.8 wins per season. Adrian Peterson, who carries the ball for the Minnesota Vikings, projected for between .6 and 5.6 victories a year.

In short, Nelms found that the running back position was more valuable than the quarterback, which is widely regarded as the most important position on the field. At the same time, he determined that an often-dismissed position like cornerback carried much more value than usually perceived.

While Nelms鈥� MWAR 鈥� Madden Wins Above Replacement 鈥� results are different from traditional findings, his research accomplished its goal.

鈥淭he whole goal of this was to better understand harder-to-understand positions,鈥� said David. 鈥淲e tried to use [the simulations] to understand how valuable these players are.鈥�

Nelms will present his findings at VMI鈥檚 undergraduate research symposium this fall, but he hopes to take his research off post as well. Twice over the last three years, VMI cadets have presented research at the Mathematical Association of America and American Mathematical Society鈥檚 Joint Mathematics Meeting, the largest such gathering in the country, and Nelms might make the trip to Atlanta for that conference this year. He is also thinking about presenting his findings at a sports analytics meeting somewhere.

鈥淎lthough our results are different,鈥� said David, 鈥淚 think there will be some people interested in what we have done so far.鈥�

鈥� Chris Floyd

-VMI-