Weak Team Research Articles

Football Rating Systems for Top-Level Competition: A Critical Survey

Comprehensive rankings of football teams have become an important, and occasionally controversial, feature of many football codes. The rationale behind these systems needs to be understood. The historical evolution of the current eight codes is briefly traced from just two: association football and rugby football, played under various forms in the mid 19th century. Based on current rules, the eight codes fall into four groups: first, Australian Rules football and Gaelic football; second, American college football, American professional football and Canadian football; third, rugby union and rugby league; and fourth, soccer. Comprehensive rating systems exist for three codes. For American college football, the Bowl Championship Series or BCS system places top US college football teams into a national championship game and other important "bowl games". That system combines two normally incompatible components, an objective adjustive computer component and a subjective human-poll component. The composite has been controversial in four of the nine years of service, when the computer component differed from the human component resulting in major changes that favored the human component each time. For rugby union, the International Rugby Board or IRB system employs a predictor/corrector adjustment in which defeating a weak team provides less gain than defeating a strong team while losing to a weak team elicits a much larger negative adjustment than losing to a strong team, arguably a fair and efficient methods for rating competitors. For soccer, FIFA have improved the previous rating systems with a new and simpler system which takes into account strength of opponents and game importance; however, all losses are treated as equal regardless of the opponents, and home advantage is ignored. An Elo based system, employing many of features of the IRB system, appears to have advantages over the FIFA system.

Home advantage and the debate about competitive balance in professional sports leagues

A recurrent theme in sports economics is the extent to which overall league attendances will be raised by measures, such as revenue sharing, which aim to improve competitive balance. This debate has ignored the phenomenon of home advantage, which may, however, be important to the extent that, if all teams had equal talent, all matches may then be weighted heavily in favour of the home team. We present an analysis of the relationship between attendance and match-level uncertainty in the English Football League. A simulation from our model indicates that equality of playing talent would in fact lower aggregate attendance. This result is explained by the loss of prospectively the most uncertain games, where weak teams have home advantage over strong teams.

Problems of Voting

It is now over 200 years since Condorcet discovered a serious paradox in the standard method of voting under substantially any of the rules of order. Most Americans are most familiar with the rules developed by General Robert’s, but almost all sets of rules used in genuinely democratic bodies are similar. A proposal is made and then modifications, called amendments are added. There is then a series of binary votes so arranged that the final outcome is a modified version of the original proposal. The modification can be extreme. Unfortunately, Condorcet discovered that some amendments or proposals, which had been defeated in the earlier part of the voting series, might be able to beat the ultimate outcome. A colleague of Condorcet in the academy proposed another voting method in which all alternatives are listed by each voter and then given a weight depending upon their location in the list. It was immediately pointed out that this method provided strategic opportunities for the voter to cheat by misspecifying his preferences. Borda replied that he designed his system for honest men, but since politics is not full of honest men this was regarded as a weak defense. The problem was largely ignored for the next two centuries. Some mathematicians seem to have been interested and one of them Dodson, better known as Lewis Carrol put in a good deal of work on the matter, but without reaching any solution. People advocating democracy, or for that matter opposing it, seem not to have known about this problem or in any event they did not discuss it. In the 1930s, a mathematician interested in field sports and engaged in scoring sports meets discovered that the method used for scoring in which the winner in a given sport was given five points, the second three points, and the third one point, and these points were aggregated in order to determine which university team won had a serious paradox (see Huntingdon, 1938). Specifically, whether A or B won the meet could be determined by whether C, a weak team was physically present or not. He published this result in a mathematical journal and it was ignored for some time. It was not until the late 40s that Arrow used this as part of his proof that voting methods all have severe difficulties.

Baseball's Antitrust Exemption: Why It Still Matters

Major League Baseball has enjoyed a presumed, blanket exemption from the nation's antitrust laws since 1922. The other team sports have no such protection, and baseball's reserve clause has been in history's dustbin since 1976. (1) Does the exemption still matter? Yes, and here are some reasons why. MLB has not faced a rival league since 1915. Its exemption has insulated the industry from legal challenges to its restrictive practices. When baseball abuses its power, the injured parties are not entitled to call for judicial review along with discovery of evidence. Over time this circumstance has led to a management culture of laxity, inefficiency, and arrogance. Evidence of this culture still persists. For instance, home field advantage in the 2003 World Series was decided for the first time by the winner of the All-Star Game. Why? Not because it made any logical or competitive sense, but because baseball was desperately grasping for a way to boost its flagging television ratings for the midseason classic. The gambit, by the way, seems to have failed: 2003 All-Star Game ratings and share were identical to the record low ratings in 2002. Worse still, the ratings among the crucial eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old male demographic were down 9.7 percent relative to 2002. The pattern here is well established. Grab for the proximate dollar and never mind about the long-term consequences. Or consider the revealing message in Michael Lewis's new book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. For decades baseball teams' front offices were run by good old boys who followed a dubious lore of player evaluation as if it were catechism. The enlightening statistical analyses of the game by innovators like Bill James went ignored until Sandy Alderson in Oakland decided that his team could benefit from James's insights in the mid-1990s. And benefit they did, creating a first-class competitive team on a shoestring budget.(2) Or take the absence of a Major League team in our nation's capital, the eighth largest media market. The NFL, NBA, and NHL, all without antitrust exemptions, have teams in Washington DC, but not baseball. Over the years MLB has offered several arguments in defense of its league's presumed antitrust exemption. First, until 1977 MLB maintained that the player reserve system was essential to preserve competitive balance in baseball and that the exemption permitted the industry to maintain this labor market restriction. Yet the reserve system simply affected whether monopoly rents went to the owners or to the players. It did not equalize the distribution of player talent. In fact, with free agency it became more expensive to hold together a winning team and easier for a weak team to turn around its fortunes. Thus, after the reserve system was eliminated, competitive balance in baseball actually improved. So much for defense number one. COMMISSIONER'S POWER Second, MLB asserted that it did not need to be regulated administratively or subjected to competitive pressure because, through its independent commissioner, it self-regulated effectively. The commissioner's power to act in the game's best interests, the argument went, was the only stewardship needed to prevent exploitation of the consumer or dynamic inefficiency. To be sure, commissioners had a small degree of wiggle room until the dismissal of Commissioner Fay Vincent in 1992. But it was only very modest wiggle room. The few commissioners who tried to exercise true independence were usually dispensed with in short order by unappreciative owners. Since 1992, however, the commissioner has been an owner. Any claim that Mr. Selig behaves as anything other than a CEO strains credulity. NO PROFIT MEANS NO MONOPOLY Third, the owners have claimed that MLB is not really a monopoly and that the absence of profitability proves it. Rather, this argument goes, baseball is one of many games in the sports industry and one of an even greater number of companies in the entertainment industry. …

The American “Not-So-Socialist” League in the Postwar Era

A suggested remedy for competitive imbalance in professional sports leagues is for home teams to share gate and broadcasting revenues. In some models, researchers assume that as a team becomes stronger, its ability to draw on the road falls (because the rival team is, ceteris paribus, weaker). The experience in the American League during the 1950s demonstrates that this assumption does not hold at all times for all leagues. In cases where stronger teams also draw well on the road, gate sharing may shift revenue from weaker teams to stronger teams.

The NCAA Cartel and Competitive Balance in College Football

The NCAA regulates college football player recruiting, eligibility, and compensation. The economic theory of cartels suggests that one consequence may be reduced competitive balance. The enforced restrictions inhibit weak teams from improving, and protect strong teams from competition. A “stratification” is implied which should be evident over time as less “churning” in national rankings and conference standings, and fewer schools achieving national prominence. I test this general hypothesis by comparing various competitive balance measures for about 25 years before and after NCAA enforcement began in 1952. The hypothesis is supported by all measures at both the national and conference levels.

Prediction of Two-Person Team Lifting Capacity

Predictive models for team lifting capacity are important for task and equipment design, as well as worker selection and placement. The purpose of this study was to develop a prediction equation for single gender and mixed gender two-person team lifting from the floor to knuckle height. Men (n=23) and women (n=17) were combined into teams of two men (n=26), two women (n=24), and one man with one woman (n=25). Independent variables included incremental dynamic lift, 38 cm upright pull, dead lift, fat free mass, and body mass. A least squares linear regression was used. In addition, an equation was developed from deadlift strengths only. The lightest individual deadlift and the sum of the individual deadlifts were the best predictors of team lifting capacity (R2 = 0.90, SEE = 16). The results indicate that two-person team lifts to knuckle height are determined by the weaker team member.