The NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Committee annually selects its national championship tournament's at-large invitees, and assigns seeds to all participants. As part of its deliberations, the Committee is provided a so-called "nitty-gritty report" for each team, containing numerous team...

We develop a stochastic Markov chain model to obtain the probability density function (pdf) for a player to win a match in tennis. By analyzing both individual player and 'field' data (all players lumped together) obtained from the 2007 Men's Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) circuit, we...

A control chart is developed specifically for monitoring batting performances in cricket. Issues associated with the need to retain extreme values and limited sampling opportunities are overcome by using a parametric approach to obtain theoretical quartiles from the distribution of individual...

In baseball, an offensive team's run scoring ability is dependent not only upon the batting skills of its players, but also their baserunning abilities. Using a Monte Carlo simulation based on actual statistics of real players, we estimate the magnitude of the effect of baserunning skills upon a...

In 1999, the International Volleyball Federation (IVF) changed the scoring system of volleyball, from the side-out scoring system to the rally scoring system. The main goal of the scoring system change was to make the length of the game more predictable. This short paper investigates whether the...

The Pinehurst Terrapin Classic (PTC) is a five day, 16 player, annual golf tournament that includes match-play and scramble rounds. Pairings must be created for each day of the tournament that ensure each pair of participants play on the same team at least once during the tournament, and ensure...

In football leagues, a won match produces three points (all for the winner) whereas a drawn match produces only two (one for each team). Here, the total resource from the viewpoint of league points is not constant and the gain of the match for both teams changes depending on the result of the...

The nature of the relationship Bill James found between the win/loss percentage of a Major League Baseball team and the number of runs the team scores and allows over the course of a season is investigated for the National Hockey League (NHL). We find the optimal form of James' model for the NHL...

The objective of this research is to provide a statistical measurement to predict the likely winners of international football tournaments with particular reference to the Euro 2008 football tournament. This research argues that there exists a positive relationship between the competitive...

Through various media channels we often hear about the value of sport as entertainment. Part of this entertainment stems from observing closely fought competition. In this paper, we ascertain the most competitive mainstream domestic competition using a generic rating engine which creates output...