Related papers: Does home advantage without crowd exist in America…
In international football (soccer), two-legged knockout ties, with each team playing at home in one leg and the final outcome decided on aggregate, are common. Many players, managers and followers seem to believe in the `second-leg home…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
Timeout is a short interruption during games used to communicate a change in strategy, to give the players a rest or to stop a negative flow in the game. Whatever the reason, coaches expect an improvement in their team's performance after a…
In sports analytics, home field advantage is a robust phenomenon where the home team wins more games than the away team. However, discovering the causal factors behind home field advantage presents unique challenges due to the…
It's not unreasonable to think that in-game sporting performance can be affected partly by what takes place off the court. We can't observe what happens between games directly. Instead, we proxy for the possibility of athletes partying by…
Most historical National Football League (NFL) analysis, both mainstream and academic, has relied on public, play-level data to generate team and player comparisons. Given the number of oft omitted variables that impact on-field results,…
Predicting the results of sport matches and competitions is an arising research field, benefiting from the growing amount of available data and the novel data analytics techniques. Excellent forecasts can be achieved by advanced machine…
Sports broadcasters inject drama into play-by-play commentary by building team and player narratives through subjective analyses and anecdotes. Prior studies based on small datasets and manual coding show that such theatrics evince…
We analyze the time series of soccer matches in a model-free way using data for the German soccer league (Bundesliga). We argue that the goal difference is a better measure for the overall fitness of a team than the number of points. It is…
There has been a consistent criticism over the past decade of the NFL franchise tag's monetary limitations due to its biased institutions in favor of the team rather than the player. But the question whether the NFL's franchise tag is fair…
Existing approaches for estimating home-field advantage (HFA) include modeling the difference between home and away scores as a function of the difference between home and away team ratings that are treated either as fixed or random…
Humans are social beings. It is therefore not surprising that the social distancing and movement restrictions associated with the Covid-19 pandemic had severe consequences for the well-being of large sections of the population, leading to…
Inefficient markets allow investors to consistently outperform the market. To demonstrate that inefficiencies exist in sports betting markets, we created a betting algorithm that generates above market returns for the NFL, NBA, NCAAF,…
We investigated the performance of the collective intelligence of NFL fans predicting the outcome of games as realized through the Vegas betting lines. Using data from 2560 games (all post-expansion, regular- and post-season games from…
American college football faces a conflict created by the desire to stage national championship games between the best teams of a season when there is no conventional playoff system to decide which those teams are. Instead, ranking of teams…
Understanding user dynamics in online communities has become an active research topic and can provide valuable insights for human behavior analysis and community management. In this work, we investigate the "bandwagon fan" phenomenon, a…
American football is an increasingly popular sport, with a growing audience in many countries in the world. The most watched American football league in the world is the United States' National Football League (NFL), where every offensive…
In a function that takes its inputs from various players, the effect of a player measures the variation he can cause in the expectation of that function. In this paper we prove a tight upper bound on the number of players with large effect,…
The influence of a fixed number of agents with the same fixed behavior on the dynamics of the minority game is studied. Alternatively, the system studied can be considered the minority game with a change in the comfort threshold away from…
In recent years, data-driven approaches have become a popular tool in a variety of sports to gain an advantage by, e.g., analysing potential strategies of opponents. Whereas the availability of play-by-play or player tracking data in sports…