This article presents a method to measure the impact of the home field advantage for intra-conference college football. The method models longitudinal data across several years while utilizing a unique home field parameter for each individual team. Additionally, two novel yet intuitive measures...

The aim of the present study was to present the playing characteristics of the teams in complex I and to attempt to determine which of these characteristics led to victory and to the final ranking of the teams. The subjects were 38 Olympic Volleyball men's games. In every game, teams were...

Many count statistics are used to evaluate pitchers such as the number of wins and losses, the number of strikeouts, the number of walks, and the number of runs allowed. For a given measure such as strikeouts, this paper focuses on the estimation of pitchers' probabilities of striking out a...

Sports leagues conduct new player entry drafts in which franchises select, in a pre-determined order, players to complement their existing rosters. We model the decision-making process of a single sports franchise during a player selection draft. The basic premise of our model is that a team...

Sports records are of great interest to physiologists, sport fans, and the public. Records set in different sports sheds light on human strengths and limitations and provides data for scientific investigations. This article presents a simple procedure for prediction of the future records. It is...

While it is generally recognized that the relative importance of different skills is not constant across different positions on a basketball team, quantification of the differences has not been well studied. 1163 box scores from games in the National Basketball Association during the 1996-97...

In the 2004 Ryder Cup Matches, US Captain Hal Sutton decided to pair his two best players, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, in the opening four-ball match. The popular press characterized this pairing with the adjectives ``bold" and ``risky" since it is generally thought that balanced teams are...

This article proposes a simple model for the prediction of track and field world records. It is best characterized as a one-sided random walk model with a mixture distribution for the error term. The mixture distribution contains one discrete and one continuous component. The discrete piece...

Major League Baseball's geographic line-up essentially was constant between 1903 and 1953, when the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee and the new publicly financed stadium built on their behalf. Other MLB teams moved prior to the 1954, 1955, 1958, 1961, 1968, 1970, 1972, and 2005 seasons. In...

Division 1-A college football adopted overtime rules in 1996. There have been 328 overtime games since, and only four times have coaches opted to go on offense first upon winning the coin toss. Thus, there is an accepted belief that starting on defense first is advantageous, as validated by...