Television Revenue and the Structure of Athletic Contests: The Case of the National Basketball Association
This study points out that changes in the format of the playoffs in the National Basketball Association have had the effect of lengthening the championship series and reducing the variance in the length of the series. These are valuable goals for the organization because they provide higher television ratings and revenues for the teams involved. Empirical evidence presented here suggests that viewership among 1.2 million additional households is at stake.
The Home-Court Advantage: How Large is it, and Does it Vary from Team to Team?
Abstract College basketball fans often speculate on the extent and nature of the home-court advantage. In this article, it is shown how questions about the size of the home-court advantage and about team-to-team differences in the home-court advantage can be addressed by fitting three different linear models to the outcomes of college basketball games. This approach was applied to data from the 1991–1992 college basketball season. The advantage of playing at home (in relation to playing on a neutral court) was estimated to be 4.68 ± 0.28 points. The effect of team-to-team differences in the home-court advantage was found to be relatively small.
The chromosomes of Chrysanthemum,
NEW varieties of the garden chrysanthemum arise primarily from seed. They are propagated vegetatively and many give rise to bud sports in sequence and in parallel to give whole families of varieties. The original sports would naturally be chimras and it is not surprising therefore that they often revert to the previous type. Whereas some varieties sport continually from the time of their origin, others remain stable for many years. Those considered in this account do, mostly, sport freely. Since varieties may remain stable for a considerable number of years and then suddenly sport it is probable that all varieties possess the ability to sport. The origin of bud sports is unpredictable. Some confusion in naming has arisen as the same or similar sports have occurred and been propagated in different places under different names. Consequently there are, for example, several forms similar to, but not identical with, the original Favourite Supreme raised by Messrs A. G. Vinten. It might well be that each individual variety would be better termed a sub-family to include all its minor variants. The different Chrysanthemum sports are described in scattered numbers of the R.H.S. Journal—more particularly, for the Favourite family, in Vol. 63, 1938, pp. 139-141. The object of this study is to discover the cause of sporting.