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American football is unique in that offensive and defensive units typically consist of separate players who don't share the field simultaneously, which tempts one to evaluate them independently. However, a team's offensive and defensive…
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…
This paper proposes a multiple-membership generalized linear mixed model for ranking college football teams using only their win/loss records. The model results in an intractable, high-dimensional integral due to the random effects…
Continuous-time assessments of game outcomes in sports have become increasingly common in the last decade. In American football, only discrete-time estimates of play value were possible, since the most advanced public football datasets were…
Tackling is a fundamental defensive move in American football, with the main purpose of stopping the forward motion of the ball-carrier. However, current tackling metrics are manually recorded outcomes that are inherently flawed due to…
With the development of measurement technology, data on the movements of actual games in various sports can be obtained and used for planning and evaluating the tactics and strategy. Defense in team sports is generally difficult to be…
In team sports, traditional ranking statistics do not allow for the simultaneous evaluation of both individuals and combinations of players. Metrics for individual player rankings often fail to include the interaction effects between groups…
The existence and justification to the home advantage -- the benefit a sports team receives when playing at home -- has been studied across sport. The majority of research on this topic is limited to individual leagues in short time frames,…
Evaluating sports players based on their performance shares core challenges with evaluating healthcare providers based on patient outcomes. Drawing on recent advances in healthcare provider profiling, we cast sports player evaluation within…
This study explores the relationship between the performance of a football team and the topological parameters of temporal passing networks. To achieve this, we propose a method to identify moments of high and low team performance based on…
Unlike other major professional sports, American football lacks comprehensive statistical ratings for player evaluation that are both reproducible and easily interpretable in terms of game outcomes. Existing methods for player evaluation in…
For NCAA football, we provide a method for sports bettors to determine if they have a positive expected value bet based on the betting lines available to them and how they believe the game will end. The method we develop modifies…
Machine learning models have demonstrated remarkable success in sports prediction in the past years, often treating sports prediction as a classification task within the field. This paper introduces new perspectives for analyzing sports…
Do NFL teams make rational decisions? What factors potentially affect the probability of wining a game in NFL? How can a team come back from a demoralizing interception? In this study we begin by examining the hypothesis of rational…
In soccer, game context can result in skewing offensive statistics in ways that might misrepresent how well a team has played. For instance, in England's 1-2 loss to France in the 2022 FIFA World Cup quarterfinal, England attempted…
We discuss individual components of the college football Bowl Championship Series, compare with a simple algorithm defined by random walks on a biased graph, attempt to predict whether the proposed changes will truly lead to increased BCS…
Even skilled fantasy football managers can be disappointed by their mid-season rosters as some players inevitably fall short of draft day expectations. Team managers can quickly discover that their team has a low score ceiling even if they…
Each December, college football fans and pundits across America debate which two teams should meet in the NCAA Division I-A National Championship game. The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) standings employed to select the teams invited to…
The standard mathematical approach to fourth-down decision making in American football is to make the decision that maximizes estimated win probability. Win probability estimates arise from machine learning models fit from historical data.…
With the vast amount of data collected on football and the growth of computing abilities, many games involving decision choices can be optimized. The underlying rule is the maximization of an expected utility of outcomes and the law of…