A Reinforcement Learning Based Approach to Play Calling in Football

Abstract

With the vast amount of data collected on football and the growth of computing abilities, many games involving decision choices can be optimized. The underlying rule is the maximization of an expected utility of outcomes and the law of large numbers. The data available allows us to compute with high accuracy the probabilities of outcomes of decisions and the well defined points system in the game allows us to have the necessary terminal utilities. With some well established theory we can then optimize choices at a single play level.