Mark E. Glickman, JQAS Editor-in-Chief, and James Albert, JQAS Past Editor-in-Chief

The December 2014 issue (volume 10, issue 4) of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports (JQAS) features four articles covering topics in American football, soccer, golf, and fly-fishing. The issue contains a diverse set of topics and highlights the breadth of issues that are salient for the application of statistical development to sports problems.

“Predicting the Draft and Career Success of Tight Ends in the National Football League,” by Jason Mulholland and Shane Jensen, is the Editor’s Choice article and available for free download for the next 12 months. The article focuses on predicting position in the NFL draft and NFL career performance among tight ends using pre-draft information. The authors apply both recursive partitioning and linear regression to assess the impact of various factors in predicting tight end success.

The article “Stochastic Model of the 2012 PGA Tour Season,” by Erik L. Heiny and Robert Lowell Heiny, develops a discrete-state Markov chain model in which the states are based on the distance from the hole. The authors fit their model using results from the 2012 PGA Tour golf season and demonstrate the use of their model to assess skill rankings for players based on under- and over-performance relative to the expected number of strokes based on the fitted Markov model.

“Scoring Rules, and the Role of Chance: Analysis of the 2008 World Fly Fishing Championships,” by Thomas W. Yee, investigates the current rules for competitive fly-fishing and proposes a fairer scoring method that does not disadvantage competitors who spend more time catching fewer, but larger, fish. The author also examines the extent to which luck plays a role based on the fit of Poisson mixed models.

Finally, “Gasping for Air: Soccer Players’ Passing Behavior at High-Altitude,” by Jorge Tovar, examines the impact of playing soccer at high elevations on passing behavior. The author fits a linear regression to estimate the effect of high altitude and concludes that players tend to pass conservatively, which results in a greater proportion of successful passes at high elevations.

These articles are available on a subscription basis. Prospective authors also can find the journal’s aims and scope, as well as manuscript submission instructions, there.