The organizers of the 2007 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports proudly introduce an issue of JQAS focused on papers presented at the conference.

The majority of statistical work on college football's Bowl Championship Series (BCS) has involved proposing or categorizing computer ratings of teams. Computer algorithms, a coaches' poll, and a media poll make up the three ratings systems that are currently equally weighted to produce an...

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...

The Brigham Young University Women's Volleyball Team recorded and rated all skills (pass, set, attack, etc.) and recorded rally outcomes (point for BYU, rally continues, point for opponent) for the entire 2006 home volleyball season. Only sequences of events occurring on BYU's side of the net...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

Received wisdom in baseball takes it as a given that it is an advantage have the last turn at bat in a baseball game. This belief is supported, implicitly or explicitly, by an argument that the team on offense benefits by knowing with certainty the number of runs it must score in the final...