Statistical Models Commons^™

How Often Does The Best Team Win? A Unified Approach To Understanding Randomness In North American Sport, Michael J. Lopez, Gregory J. Matthews, Benjamin S. Baumer

Mathematics and Statistics: Faculty Publications and Other Works

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 …