Title: The NFL Coaching Network: Analysis of the Social Network Among Professional Football Coaches
Author(s): Andrew Fast, David Jensen
Venue: AAAI Fall Symposia on 'Capturing and Using Patterns for Evidence Detection' 2006
Abstract: The interactions of professional football coaches and teams in the National Football League (NFL) form a complex social network.  This network provides a great opportunity to analyze the influence that coaching mentors have on their proteges.  Based on this network, we identify a number of characteristics of championship coaches that can be used to predict future coaching success.  We also utilize the coaching network to learn a model of which teams will make the playoffs in a given year. Developing comprehensive models of complex adaptive networks, such as the network of NFL coaches, poses a difficult challenge for researchers. From our analysis of the NFL, we identify three types of dependencies that any model of complex network data must be able to represent.
Full Text: [PDF]
Playoffs: [2006 Playoff Predictions]
BibTex:
@inproceedings{fast2006nfl, 
    Author = {Andrew Fast and David Jensen},     
    Booktitle = {Proceedings of AAAI Fall Symposium on Capturing and Using Patterns for Evidence Detection},    
    Title = {The NFL Coaching Network: Analysis of the Social Network Among Professional Football Coaches},    
    Year = {2006}}