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 rank of an object is its relative importance to the other objects in the set. Often a rank is an integer assigned from the set 1,...,n. A ranking model is a method of determining a way in which the ranks are assigned. Usually a ranking model uses information available on the objects to...

The official handicapping system of the Royal Canadian Golf Association (RCGA) is very similar to the handicapping system of the United States Golf Association (USGA). Although these handicapping systems are complex and have been carefully studied, the systems do not take statistical theory into...

This paper first presents a brief review of potential rating tools and methods for predicting success in the NCAA basketball tournament, including those methods (such as the Ratings Percentage Index, or RPI) that receive a great deal of weight in selecting and seeding teams for the tournament....

In soccer, a scoreless draw is typically considered as an unwanted result that often jeopardizes the spectacle value of the game. In the present work, we tried to investigate a) how common scoreless draws are, and b) the relationship between scoreless draws and other indices of a football team's...

Age effects in baseball are estimated in this paper using a nonlinear fixed-effects regression. The sample consists of all players who have played 10 or more "full-time" years in the major leagues between 1921 and 2004. Quadratic improvement is assumed up to a peak-performance age, which is...

The objective of this research is to compare average slugging percentages between each of the various types of counts in baseball. Data is collected from 1260 MLB games played between March 20, 2008 and April 20, 2008. It is found that the average slugging percentage is significantly lower in...

This paper sets out to estimate univariate time series models on a selected set of offensive baseball measures from 1901 to 2005. The measures include homeruns, bases on balls, runs batted in, doubles, and stolen bases. The paper next estimates the trends in these statistics simultaneously using...

To date, the factors which lead to the very large home court advantage characteristic of the NBA have not yet been well isolated. This study analyzes the relationship between that home court advantage and the comparatively fewer days of rest between games that the NBA schedule imposes on...

We propose a Markov chain model of a best-of-7 game playoff series that involves game-to-game dependence on the current status of the series. To create a relatively parsimonious model, we seek to group transition probabilities of the Markov chain into clusters of similar game-winning frequency....