Before any play of a National Football League (NFL) game, the probability that a given team will win depends on many situational variables (such as time remaining, yards to go for a first down, field position and current score) as well as the relative quality of the two teams as quantified by...

The Referee Assignment Problem (RAP) is a novel arising problem in sports management, in which a limited number of referees with different qualifications and availabilities should be assigned to a set of games already scheduled, in order to respect a list of constraints. Number and nature of...

Multiple models are discussed for ranking teams in a league and introduce a new model called the Oracle method. This is a Markovovian method that can be customized to incorporate multiple team traits into its ranking. Using a foresight prediction of NFL game outcomes for the 2002–2013 seasons,...

The standard metric for American football field goal kickers is simply the percentage of attempts successfully converted. Due to variance in distance of attempts and other conditions (weather, altitude, defense, etc.), we argue that field goal percentage is an insufficient measure of kicker...

This paper considers the decision problem of when to declare during the third innings of a test cricket match. There are various factors that affect the decision of the declaring team including the target score, the number of overs remaining, the relative desire to win versus draw, and the...

Objectives: Identifying performance indicators related to rugby sevens competition outcomes will inform development of team tactics that increase the likelihood of success. This study characterized 16 team performance indicators and quantified the effect of changes and differences in performance...

We consider the modeling of individual batting performance in one-day international (ODI) cricket by using a batsman-specific hidden Markov model (HMM). The batsman-specific number of hidden states allows us to account for the heterogeneous dynamics found in batting performance. Parallel...

We present a notational analysis of offensive tactics commonly employed in elite men’s water polo and address three questions related to this objective: which tactics are most effective?, which tactical performance indicators best classify the winning team?, and how accurate are predictive...

This paper models the TV audience for NFL games in a market without a local team. The model is estimated using all NFL games shown in the Salt Lake City market over the last 10 years. Team popularity varies season to season, with fans preferring high-scoring close games between good teams. The...