How Often Does the Best Team Win? A Unified Approach to Understanding Randomness in North American Sport

Statistical applications in sports have long centered on how to best separate signal (e.g. team talent) from random noise. However, most of this work has concentrated on a single sport, and the development of meaningful cross-sport comparisons has been impeded by the difficulty of translating luck from one sport to another. In this manuscript, we develop Bayesian state-space models using betting market data that can be uniformly applied across sporting organizations to better understand the role of randomness in game outcomes. These models can be used to extract estimates of team strength, the between-season, within-season, and game-to-game variability of team strengths, as well each team’s home advantage. We implement our approach across a decade of play in each of the National Football League (NFL), National Hockey League (NHL), National Basketball Association (NBA), and Major League Baseball (MLB), finding that the NBA demonstrates both the largest dispersion in talent and the largest home advantage, while the NHL and MLB stand out for their relative randomness in game outcomes. We conclude by proposing new metrics for judging competitiveness across sports leagues, both within the regular season and using traditional postseason tournament formats. Although we focus on sports, we discuss a number of other situations in which our generalizable models might be usefully applied

2017 NHL Winter Classic

This thesis paper examined one of the National Hockey League\u27s (NHL) premier events, the Winter Classic, in preparation of their 2017 game. In an effort to set guidelines and objectives in pursuit of growing the NHL brand, this comprehensive report reviewed the detailed positioning of this product extension through the marketing of nostalgic memories of early hockey traditions. Taking place in Minneapolis, MN, the Winter Classic is a regular season hockey game played in an open-air stadium on New Year\u27s Day. The uniqueness of this event is developed herein through an examination of the marketing mix to help define its strategic marketing plan. This event proposal further outlined effective management skills and techniques necessary for this event to be successful. This included a prioritized duty of a thorough and itemized risk management plan, and an ethical analysis of the image this event is portraying to the greater sports community. Finally, implementation and evaluation of the core event was defined for simplified execution and reproduction

Montana Kaimin, March 14, 2003

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/studentnewspaper/5746/thumbnail.jp

An historical analysis of women’s emergence into intercollegiate athletic leadership: Eastern Michigan University, a case study

The implementation of Title IX has increased women’s participation rates in intercollegiate athletics tenfold, yet women’s representation in athletic leadership remains marginal compared to men. As such, the purpose of this study was to understand the social construction of gender as it relates to intercollegiate athletic leadership at Eastern Michigan University. The study explored the history of sporting activities as a mechanism to shape and perpetuate masculine and feminine culture. These values (i.e, competitiveness and cooperativeness) were institutionalized in higher education as sex-segregated physical education and athletic functions. This historical case study applied organizational and institutional theory analyzing the institutional, task, and cultural environments of men’s and women’s intercollegiate athletics. Men and women managed distinct athletic production functions reassured by the greater cultural environment and legitimized by regulatory bodies in the institutional environment. Changes imposed from Title IX in the institutional environment were met with opposition from the cultural environment. The task environment, however, supported the male model of intercollegiate athletics and absorbed women’s athletics as mandated by Title IX. Therefore, the majority of women athletic leaders remained in alignment with their positions as congruent to the dominant cultural environment and thus created a vacuum of coaches and administrators who once were occupying 90% of women athletic leadership. The task environment, which supported a technical core of producing competitive games, filled coaching appointments for the women’s program. Today, the cultural environment accepts participation of women in sports, yet women as intercollegiate athletic leaders still confront resistance from the cultural environment. This research provides a new perspective to women in sport while affirming the power of culture on our athletic institutions