News Room

Joe Byrum feels a little bit like Billy Beane in “Moneyball.”

Beane, for those who don’t follow baseball, was the general manager who put an emphasis on mathematics and advanced technology when putting together his team. He started looking at numbers and changing his approach to the game.

Byrum, head of seeds product development for soybeans at Syngenta, has helped his company to push advanced analytics in the soybean breeding process.

“It’s the ‘Moneyball’ approach,” he said, describing a data-driven analysis approach that helped the company win the 2015 Franz Edelman award presented by the Institute for Operation Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

[Incoming INFORMS Vice President Laura] Albert McLay, a professor in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, has been using her knowledge of math models and sports analytics to predict which teams are most likely to make the four-team tournament crowning college football’s national champion. She posts the weekly rankings on her blog, Badger Bracketology.

Now in her second year projecting the playoff, McLay says the statistical concepts she uses are some of the same ones she teaches her students in the classroom. She plans to start modeling the NCAA men’s basketball tournament this season.

What does preliminary information say about the crash of the passenger jet flying over the Sinai Peninsula? Was there an explosive device? INFORMS Treasurer Sheldon Jacobson, an aviation security expert, discusses the possibilities in this streaming video interview.

As the debate continues over whether college student-athletes should be paid for their on-field performances, a new study from Harvard Business School reveals just how much intercollegiate football and basketball programs contribute to a school’s bottom line.

The quantitative link between game day and payday is courtesy of Assistant Professor Doug J. Chung, who reviewed 117 schools with Division I football and basketball teams, matching athletic performance with revenue flow covering an 11-year period. The findings were jaw-dropping—winning just one more football game in a season, for example, could bump revenues by as much as $3 million for a high-powered program like Alabama or Michigan.

Chung details the correlation between wins on the field and wins for a school’s piggy bank in his paper, How Much Is a Win Worth? An Application to Intercollegiate Athletics, forthcoming in Management Science.