Related papers: Random Walker Ranking for NCAA Division I-A Footba…
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…
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…
Competition is ubiquitous in many complex biological, social, and technological systems, playing an integral role in the evolutionary dynamics of the systems. It is often useful to determine the dominance hierarchy or the rankings of the…
We present evidence, based on play-by-play data from all 6087 games from the 2006/07--2009/10 seasons of the National Basketball Association (NBA), that basketball scoring is well described by a weakly-biased continuous-time random walk.…
The Football World Cup as world's favorite sporting event is a source of both entertainment and overwhelming amount of data about the games played. In this paper we analyse the available data on football world championships since 1930 until…
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…
We introduce a Bayesian mean-value approach for ranking all college football teams using only win-loss data. This approach is unique in that the prior distribution necessary to handle undefeated and winless teams is calculated…
There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…
This document describes a new system for selecting teams for the NCAA Men's Division I Lacrosse championship tournament called "Powerwise" that was developed in discussions with the NCAA Lacrosse Selection Criteria and Ranking Committee…
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…
Our objective is to find the five best college sports coaches of past century for three different sports. We decided to look at men's basketball, football, and baseball. We wanted to use an approach that could definitively determine team…
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 main objective of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the margin of victory can be predicted solely by the rankings of the opposing teams in NCAA Division I men's basketball games. Several past studies have modeled this…
This document describes a system for selecting teams to the NCAA Men's Division I Lacrosse Championship Tournament called "Safe3Step" (S3S) that was developed in conversation with the NCAA Lacrosse Selection Criteria and Ranking Committee…
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…
Any collection can be ranked. Sports and games are common examples of ranked systems: players and teams are constantly ranked using different methods. The statistical properties of rankings have been studied for almost a century in a…
League competition is investigated using random processes and scaling techniques. In our model, a weak team can upset a strong team with a fixed probability. Teams play an equal number of head-to-head matches and the team with the largest…
It is common to be interested in rankings or order relationships among entities. In complex settings where one does not directly measure a univariate statistic upon which to base ranks, such inferences typically rely on statistical models…
A random walk-like model is considered to discuss statistical aspects of tournaments. The model is applied to soccer leagues with emphasis on the scores. This competitive system was computationally simulated and the results are compared…
The Maker-Breaker connectivity game and Hamilton cycle game belong to the best studied games in positional games theory, including results on biased games, games on random graphs and fast winning strategies. Recently, the Connector-Breaker…