On March 30, 2008, Samuel Arbesman and Steven Strogatz had their article "A Journey to Baseball's Alternate Universe" published in The New York Times. They simulated baseball's entire history 10,000 times to ask how likely it was for anyone in baseball history to achieve a streak that is at...

The current study analyzed historical performance data in order to contribute to the understanding of the development of elite athletes. Data for elite adult and youth swimmers from 1962 to 2007 were employed to identify changes in American swimming records and in the performances of elite...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 following paper examines potential sources of bias in National Basketball Association (NBA) playoffs. Employing NBA playoff data from 2003 through 2008, we investigate the expected margin of victory by the favored team. This method, by incorporating potentially mitigating variables, can also...

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...