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The purpose of
this project
is to develop a software tool for simulating
the draft of professional sports. The software will take a list
of draft candidates, a list of teams, and for each team drafting
will apply a selection rule for the candidate, and determine who
would be drafted. There will be a default list of draft candidates,
and each team will be allowed to submit its own list of candidates,
as well as a file detailing the rule by which players will be drafted
for that team (e.g. Best Possible Athlete, or BPA, or needs based
on player position).
The intent of
the software is to develop a methodology for determining who might
be drafted and in what position of the draft. The software should
eventually be capable of handling deterministic rules sets (ones
that lead to one unique draft) and stochastic rules sets (that have
varying probabilities) and outputting data accordingly.
The reason this
project would be best pursued in the context of open source software
is that I anticipate considerable controversy over the exact implementation
of draft rules. By leaving all the code available by open source
license, then those who have strong opinions about such rules can
implement their own.
The impetus
behind the project is that there is
considerable interest in mock drafts
in professional sports, as well as interest in the
actual
draft strategy employed by teams. There are dozens of web sites
that play to this interest and a substantial number of scouts cater
to this fan-based curiousity. Though I don't anticipate the first
generation of this software to be web based, a simulation tool,
with a java enabled web interface, would allow a fan to submit a
'top 100 list' and a rules set for his favorite team and receive
in return a battery of statistical information about his team as
a whole, or the draft position of a particular player. Therefore,
while the project itself is open source and perhaps academic, the
product once developed has commercial application.
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