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Given the importance of accurate team rankings in American college football (CFB) -- due to heavy title and playoff implications -- strides have been made to improve evaluation metrics across statistical categories, going from basic…
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,…
Traditional NBA player evaluation metrics are based on scoring differential or some pace-adjusted linear combination of box score statistics like points, rebounds, assists, etc. These measures treat performances with the outcome of the game…
Traditional assessments of tackling in American Football often only consider the number of tackles made, without adequately accounting for their context and importance for the game. Aiming for improvement, we develop a metric that…
There are at least two ways to interpret numerical degrees of belief in terms of betting: (1) you can offer to bet at the odds defined by the degrees of belief, or (2) you can judge that a strategy for taking advantage of such betting…
This paper aims to reduce randomness in football by analysing the role of lineups in final scores using machine learning prediction models we have developed. Football clubs invest millions of dollars on lineups and knowing how individual…
Converting betting odds into accurate outcome probabilities is a fundamental challenge in order to use betting odds as a benchmark for sports forecasting and market efficiency analysis. In this study, we propose two methods to overcome the…
This paper considers the challenge of designing football group draw mechanisms which have the uniform distribution over all valid draw assignments, but are also entertaining, practical, and transparent. We explain how to simulate the FIFA…
Conventional statistics begins with a model, and assigns a likelihood of obtaining any particular set of data. The opposite approach, beginning with the data and assigning a likelihood to any particular model, is explored here for the case…
An accumulator is a bet that presents a rather unique payout structure, in that it combines multiple bets into a wager that can generate a total payout given by the multiplication of the individual odds of its parts. These potentially…
Sports analytics -- broadly defined as the pursuit of improvement in athletic performance through the analysis of data -- has expanded its footprint both in the professional sports industry and in academia over the past 30 years. In this…
A team of association football players may be envisioned as a directed network with player nodes and weighted pass edges. Such a simplistic representation of an otherwise complex structure yields several benefits, but also permits the…
We developed an artificial intelligence approach to predict the transfer fee of a football player. This model can help clubs make better decisions about which players to buy and sell, which can lead to improved performance and increased…
Models in which the number of goals scored by a team in a soccer match follow a Poisson distribution, or a closely related one, have been widely discussed. We here consider a soccer match as an experiment to assess which of two teams is…
A risk-neutral valuation framework is developed for pricing and hedging in-play football bets based on modelling scores by independent Poisson processes with constant intensities. The Fundamental Theorems of Asset Pricing are applied to…
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…
We showcase in this paper the use of some tools from network theory to describe the strategy of football teams. Using passing data made available by FIFA during the 2010 World Cup, we construct for each team a weighted and directed network…
Football forecasting models traditionally rate teams on past match results, that is based on the number of goals scored. Goals, however, involve a high element of chance and thus past results often do not reflect the performances of the…
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…
In most sports, especially football, most coaches and analysts search for key performance indicators using notational analysis. This method utilizes a statistical summary of events based on video footage and numerical records of goal…