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...

In the sport of Highland Dance, Championships are often contested where the order of dance is randomized in each of the four dances. As it is a widely held belief that competing in the latter sets is advantageous, this paper develops algorithms where balance is achieved in the dance order....

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...

Position play is a key feature of carom billiards: on easy shots, players can manage to score while ensuring that the next position will be favorable. The difficulty of a shot therefore depends on the previous shot; e.g., an easy shot generally follows an easy shot. We introduce a Markov process...

Rating -- and subsequently ranking -- college football teams requires making sense of sometimes conflicting pair-wise comparisons. Classical statistical techniques fall into one of two classes: win/loss models, which focus on binary outcomes, and point-scoring models, which consider the...

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...

The 10 disciplines in the decathlon can be broadly characterised as running, jumping and throwing. However, these simplistic characteristics may not represent the groupings defined by performances in the decathlon. The identification of groups may reveal a recondite advantage for athletes who...

Using data from the 4,858 baseball games that were played in the major leagues during the 2004 and 2005 seasons, four logit regression models that measure the likelihood of a team winning a game are estimated. Of particular interest is the effect of being the home team. As expected, the results...

There is a growing literature on the statistical analysis of data from association-football/soccer games, seasons or groups of seasons. In contrast this paper is concerned with a single play, that is a sequence of successful passes. The play studied contained 25 passes and ended in a goal for...

We present a quantitative analysis of throwing ability for major league outfielders and catchers. We use detailed game event data to tabulate success and failure events in outfielder and catcher throwing opportunities. We attribute a run contribution to each success or failure which is tabulated...