Tag: basketball

OM in the News: Oregon’s Basketball Scheduling Nightmare

operations management and NCAA and basketballWhen the University of Oregon announced last summer that it was joining the Big Ten conference, it discovered that its team would spend more time this season up in the air than actually playing basketball. Since their season began in November, the Ducks have crisscrossed the country so frequently that the total distance they’ve traveled this season amounts to 26,700 miles, the equivalent of traveling the entire circumference of planet Earth.

Oregon is by no means the only team racking up air miles this season, reports The Wall Street Journal (March 15-16, 2025). The most recent wave of conference realignment has stretched the bounds of geographic imagination in college sports, sending schools like California and Stanford to the Atlantic Coast Conference and plunking UCF (in Orlando)  in the Big 12, traditionally based in the Great Plains.

The Big Ten did its best to design a schedule that mitigated the impact on West Coast teams. The conference tried to avoid scheduling away games when players would be taking final exams and sequenced opponents so that traveling teams could play two games on a single road trip. “The scheduling of it,” said the Big Ten CEO, “is a sport in itself.”

Doing this in practice, however, often meant Oregon was forced to spend several days away from campus. When the Ducks made their first cross-country trip to play Ohio State and Penn State in January, the team spent 6 days and 5 nights on the road. More troubling than the flying was the amount of time-zone hopping the team was forced into, which included two road trips to the eastern time zone and two more to the central. Internal clocks are most thrown off by eastward travel of 3-5 hours, which can negatively affect reaction time, concentration and athletic performance.

That’s not the only reason that Oregon’s road trips are more disruptive. In the Pac-12, league games only took place on Thursdays and Sundays. The Big Ten plays every night of the week. To make all the travel work with academics, every player at Oregon had enroll in online classes this term—the first time that’s happened.

The graphic below shows intraconference away game travel for former Pac-12 teams. 2023-24 is on the left and 2024-25 is on the right.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. How can OM help with this problem?
  2. What about other college sports?

Good OM Reading: Using LP to Schedule NCAA Basketball Tournament Games

What could be more timely than an article in the Journal of the Operations Research Society called “Team Assignments and Scheduling for the NCAA Basketball Tournament.”  The paper, by U. of Alabama professors S.H. Melouk and B.B. Keskin, provides a wonderful example to use in class when you teach linear programming, in Module B.

The authors write: “The buzz of the tournament and the fanatical behavior of the followers of the participating teams serve as our motivation to examine and develop a team assignment model that maintains the integrity of the tournament while also attempting to place teams closer to their campus location, thus making it easier for both fans and teams to travel to the game sites. Observation of game venues shows a decrease in the actual attendance at early round tournament games. In 2010, actual attendance at the early round game sites was, on average, 83.5% of capacity. This statistic is surprisingly low. A likely contributing factor is the long distances that fans must travel to attend games.”

The growing NCAA concern is travel expenses of the participating teams, as the NCAA reimburses each team for their travel to tournament games. Given there are 68 tournament teams, it is a significant expense to transport the players, their equipment, and coaching staffs to game sites. In an effort to curb expenses, the NCAA  requires a minimum distance of 350 miles from a game site before air travel is reimbursable.

The article describes the development of an integer LP program designed to optimize team assignments in the sense of minimizing the total distance travelled by teams to game sites. Results of testing the model against actual tournament assignments  show consistent and significant cost savings and reductions in distance travelled. In fact, 28,202 travel miles were saved in 2010 with use of the LP model.