The passing premium puzzle states that NFL teams do not call enough passing plays, despite rule changes since the late 1970's that have increased the expected return to passing. This paper develops a simple portfolio model to determine how a coach could determine an optimal share of running and...

In this paper, we propose a team rating system that accounts for differences in strength of schedule by computing an additive correction factor which adjusts team winning percentage. This approach permits teams to be ranked appropriately despite disparate schedules. Our method is easy to compute...

New Growth Theory is the science of research, knowledge, and designs. The foundation of New Growth Theory is that technological change, improvement in the instructions for mixing resources, lies at the heart of growth and improvement. Designs are the instructions that turn resources into useful...

In many sport competitions athletes, teams, or countries are evaluated based on several variables. The strong assumptions underlying traditional 'linear weight' scoring systems (that the relative importance, interactions and linearizing transformations of the variables are known) can often not...

Protecting the quarterback is an integral part of the passing game in the National Football league, yet the relationship between the abilities of an individual lineman and the effectiveness of a passing game remains unexplored. One of the principal reasons for this lack of study is the absence...

Goal scoring in sports such as hockey and soccer is often modeled as a Poisson process. We work with a Poisson model where the mean goals scored by the home team is the sum of parameters for the home team's offense, the road team's defense, and a home advantage. The mean goals for the road team...

Racing data provides a rich source of analysis for quantitative researchers to study multi-entry competitions. This paper first explores statistical modeling to investigate the favorite-longshot betting bias using world-wide horse race data. The result shows that the bias phenomenon is not...

Recent studies have documented the existence of an own-race bias on the part of sports officials. In this paper we explore the implications of these biases on betting markets. We use data from the 1991/92 - 2004/05 NBA regular seasons to show that a betting strategy exploiting own-race biases by...

This paper begins with a thorough review of previous quantitative literature dedicated to the development of ratings for college and professional football teams, and also considers various methods that have been proposed for predicting the outcomes of future football games. Building on this...

In this paper an expression for the probability of winning a game in a tennis match is derived under the assumption that the outcome of each point is identically and independently distributed. Important properties of the formula are evaluated and presented pictorially. The accuracy of this...