I have had a baseball lineup optimizer running on this site since June. Pointing it at football looked like a small job — swap ten roster slots for nine, swap a $50,000 cap for a $60,000 one, done. That part took an afternoon. The part that took actual thought was that baseball and football are correlated in completely different ways, and correlation is the whole game.
In baseball, the correlation is sequential. Batters score in a chain: a single sets up the double that drives him in. That is why my MLB optimizer has a constraint forcing four hitters from one team into consecutive batting-order spots — 3-4-5-6, not 2-5-7-9. In football there is no batting order. The correlation is simultaneous, and it is much sharper.
