Will Game Theory Decide Stanford Baseball’s New Head Coach
After 40 years of coaching baseball at Stanford, legendary Coach Mark Marquess will coach his last season as a Cardinal in 2017. To put things in perspective, he has won over 1500 games, 2 national championships, and accolades greater than any current college baseball coach. For the first time in 40 years, Stanford Athletics will be faced with one of the toughest decisions to make in athletics: hiring a new head coach. Here’s how game theory can decide Stanford’s new baseball coach.
An article written by breakingmuscle.com, explains how game theory can be applied to hiring a new strength coach. This sparked my thoughts in parallel to game theory and how Stanford could hire a new baseball coach. In the article it is mentioned that the two players of the game can be the hirer and the hiree. In the decision of hiring a new coach, one player would be Stanford, and all of its desires are its strategies (ex. strategy 1: win as many games as possible, strategy 2: improve the individual players baseball, strategy 3: ensure all players graduate). The other player on the other side of the matrix would be all of the coaches applying for a position. In this given scenario, Stanford could weigh all possible outcomes given the background on the coach. After interviewing all coaches, and identifying strengths and weaknesses, Stanford could rank each coach and create a payoff matrix based off of their desires. If they value winning the most, educating players second, and improving individual players third, they could give each coach a rating for each of these desires and weight each category. Consider the following example where Stanford values winning 3 times more than improving individual players, and values educating players 2 times more than improving individual players. We can play a game similar to the hotel example we used in class.
| Coach A | Coach B | Coach C | |
| Winning | 8 | 4 | 2 |
| Education | 1 | 4 | 8 |
| Improve Players | 1 | 4 | 9 |
Stanford would then need to score each coach using the following method: For each coach, sum the score of each desire by the weighted value they receive (Winning x3, education x2, improving players x1).
The Scores for each coach:
Coach A = 3*8 + 2*1 + 1*1 = 27
Coach B = 3*4 + 2*4 + 1*4 = 24
Coach C = 3*2 + 2*8 + 1*9 = 31.
In this theoretical game where Stanford values (Winning x3, education x2, improving players x1), Coach C should be the head coach.
Obviously, hiring a head coach has many more factors that can be hard to determine, but if Stanford is able to identify the qualities they look for in a coach, how much they value each quality, and identify how strong each coach is in each quality, this is one way that Stanford Athletics can decide to choose a new head coach for the upcoming 2018 season.
Go Card!
https://breakingmuscle.com/learn/use-game-theory-to-increase-your-odds-of-hiring-the-best-coach
