The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate two methods to quantify skill importance for teams in general, and women's volleyball in particular. A division I women's volleyball team rated each skill (serve, pass, set, etc.) and recorded rally outcomes during all home games in a competitive...

This paper analyzes the situation in a best-of-N set match, where both players/teams are given the opportunity to increase their probability of winning a set (increase in effort) on one particular set. To gain insight to the problem, a best-of-3 set match (as typically used in tennis) is...

Coaches in the NFL make approximately 1000 offensive play calls during the regular season. These calls are the result of countless hours of preparation and analysis and the coach's own personal experience and each coach has their own measures of success and biases regarding types of play calls....

Tournament design is of crucial importance in competitive sports. The primary goal of effective tournament design is to provide incentives for the participants to maximize their performance both during the tournament and in the time period leading up to the tournament. In spectator sports, a...

This paper aims to analyse the efficiency of the teams that have participated in the last eight seasons in the Spanish football (soccer) league (LFP). Efficiency is based on technical aspects of the sport rather than variables of an economic nature due to how difficult it is to obtain such...

It is often postulated that an increased hip to shoulder differential angle (`X-Factor') during the early downswing better utilises the stretch-shorten cycle and improves golf performance. The current study aims to examine the potential relationship between the X-Factor and performance during...

The purpose of this study is to identify a function for the team performance for professional ice hockey teams in Sweden. In order to understand how team performance relates to key variables such as coaching ability and coaching experience and succession, the OLS (Ordinary Least Squares) and the...

This paper describes an objective way of predicting the likelihood of major league baseball players being elected to the Hall of Fame by members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America. A radial basis function (RBF) network is used to build separate machine learning models for pitchers...

Extending the work of Connolly and Rendleman (2008), we document the dominance of Tiger Woods during the 1998-2001 PGA Tour seasons. We show that by playing 'average,' Woods could have won some tournaments and placed no worse than fourth in the tournaments in which he participated in the year...

With the advent of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) much emphasis has been placed on ranking teams. We consider several mathematical methods for ranking college football teams based on point differential including least squares with fixed or mixed effects. We also consider the use of...