Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

The Bradley-Terry Model In Binary Outcome Driven Rankings: An Apllication In Amateur Hockey, Connor Meissner, Jeremy M. Losak

Sport Management - All Scholarship

Ranking systems serve critical roles in sport settings, most notably in determining playoff participants and seeding. Numerous ranking methodologies exist that incorporate many input measures and produce models that are highly predictive of game outcomes. However, there are circumstances—especially for amateur sport leagues—in which more complex inputs are either unavailable or not desirable, as they may lead to adverse performance incentives. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to highlight a ranking methodology that only considers binary game outcomes, i.e., wins and losses. Specifically, we consider the efficacy of the Bradley-Terry Model to rank sport teams for playoff consideration. We …