Scholarly sports: Influence of social science academe on sports rules and policy

Abstract

This paper is an orthogonal study to that of Kendall and Lenten (2017)—on the perverse unintended consequences of badly designed sports rules. This paper, unlike the previous one, focuses on the positive narrative by aggregating a collection of academic work proposing rule change ideas, some of which have been implemented already. We also discuss further compelling ideas within the multidisciplinary literature that could yet be considered and adopted by sports administrators. Many of these ideas essentially aim to “solve a problem” inherent under the current (or a previous) status quo, and invariably use tools from fields of social scientific literature such as operational research, statistics and economics.

Keywords:

• Optimization
• practice of OR
• sports

JEL CLASSIFICATIONS:

• Z28

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Tony Corke, Nic La Rosa, Michael Smiddy, Mark Stewart and Niven Winchester for their useful input, as well as several cited authors for verifying details regarding their respective works that were analyzed in this paper. An earlier version was presented at a La Trobe University seminar on March 6, 2020.

Notes

1 Two very different examples of this nature include: (i) the reforms to concussion rules in American football owing to the findings of Omalu et al. (2005) and similarly the dispensing of protective headgear in amateur boxing (owing to Loosemore et al., 2017)—the former case was dramatized in the 2015 motion picture, Concussion, starring Will Smith; and (ii) reaction time studies—for example, Lipps et al. (2011)—informing changes made to false-start rules in athletics.

2 As an example here, economist Jeff Borland (University of Melbourne) was commissioned by the Australian Football League (AFL) to develop a formula for the allocation of Priority picks as part of reforms to the League’s Draft system in 2012, in response to claims of “tanking” (see also subsection 3.1). However, that work did not draw directly on his previous published academic work on tanking in the AFL—specifically Borland et al. (2009).

3 Of note is that the death of Tony Lewis in April 2020 was commemorated by the ICC via an acknowledging press release (see https://www.icc-cricket.com/media-releases/1651594), in which it recognized the importance of his joint work to the sport.

4 We believe this unconditional probability to be upward biased, due to the home team (with its natural advantage) winning the overtime toss 60.4 per cent of the time in this sub-sample.

5 Incidentally, UEFA (24 June 2021) announced on it would dispense the away-goal rule—a feature of UEFA competitions (e.g. Champions and Europa Leagues) involving two-leg knockout ties since 1965. This change will likely increase fairness (Jost, 2021, critiques its competitive-balance effects). Nevertheless, we postulate this change will produce significantly more two-legged ties advancing to (second-leg) extra-time and penalty-shootouts, which may prove unpopular. The current rule proposal is a worthy preemptive policy to circumvent penalty shootouts deciding more future ties.

6 However, it is worth noting that this rule (or a variant thereof) still persists in numerous other sports, like ice hockey (e.g. NHL) and rugby league (e.g. National Rugby League, NRL). However, these sports fundamentally tend to be higher scoring, meaning in which such a system should work more effectively as intended.