The placing of NHL players into categories such as stars, average journeyman forwards, defensive forward, etc., is a popular pastime of fans and professional sports commentators. This is usually done in an ad hoc manner, sometimes contentiously, and without reference to any detailed analysis of...

This paper uses K-means cluster analysis and multinomial mixture models to categorize professional golfer performance for the period 1980 to 2006. We collected, cleaned and analyzed final annual money list standings for PGA Tour players from www.pgatour.com. Correlation patterns between other...

In this paper we examine the use of neural networks as a tool for predicting the success of basketball teams in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Statistics for 620 NBA games were collected and used to train a variety of neural networks such as feed-forward, radial basis, probabilistic...

The concept of teammates whose skills `fit' together is explored through frescoball, the beach paddleball game with two people hitting a ball back and forth trying to keep it in the air. This simple game can be analyzed through Markov Chains to obtain the expected number of hits between the two...

We study the effect of the red card in a soccer game. A red card is given by a referee to signify that a player has been sent off following serious misconduct. The player who has been sent off must leave the game immediately and cannot be replaced during the game. His team must continue the game...

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...

The issue of competitive balance is not normally considered in the study of home advantage. This paper focuses on home advantage, assessing and comparing it between seasons. The strength of the teams is estimated and linked with competitive balance. The results support that, in both the eighties...

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...

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...

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationships among National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I football teams' 2002 recruiting rankings from the Rivals (RIV) and Scouts (SCO) recruiting services and the Jeff Sagarin end-of-season performance ratings from...