Related papers: The Bowl Championship Series: A Mathematical Revie…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Predicting the outcomes of future events is a challenging problem for which a variety of solution methods have been explored and attempted. We present an empirical comparison of a variety of online and offline adaptive algorithms for…
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…
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…
We give polynomial time algorithms for deciding almost-sure and limit-sure reachability in Branching Concurrent Stochastic Games (BCSGs). These are a class of infinite-state imperfect-information stochastic games that generalize both…
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…
An open problem posed by the first author is the complexity to decide whether a sequence of nonnegative integer numbers can be the final score of a football tournament. In this paper we propose polynomial time approximate and exponential…
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…
In this paper, a new continuous scoring system for soccer is proposed, based on the proportion of time that a team is winning, losing or tied. Several simulations are made applying this technique to complete seasons of different leagues. As…
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…
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 non-scientific event of a soccer match is analysed on a strictly scientific level. The analysis is based on the recently introduced concept of a team fitness (Eur. Phys. J. B 67, 445, 2009) and requires the use of finite-size scaling. A…
We analyse a mathematical model of seeding for sports contests with round-robin qualifying tournaments. The standard seeding system based on coefficients measuring the historical performance of the teams is shown to be unfair as it might…
A new formalism for analyzing the progression of cricket game using Stochastic differential equation (SDE) is introduced. This theory enables a quantitative way of representing every team using three key variables which have physical…
Maddox, et al. [9, 10] establish Bayesian methods for estimating home-team in-game win probability for college and NBA basketball. This paper introduces a Bayesian approach for estimating in-game home-team win probability for Division-I FBS…
Ranking the participants of a tournament has applications in voting, paired comparisons analysis, sports and other domains. In this paper we introduce bipartite tournaments, which model situations in which two different kinds of entity…
This paper explores multi-entry strategies for betting pools related to single-elimination tournaments. In such betting pools, participants select winners of games, and their respective score is a weighted sum of the number of correct…