This paper revisits one such “on the field” decision-participation in overtime games in American college football. This use of analytics transcends different sports, including those who have a long history of many statistics (such as baseball) to those which are more nascent in the use of big data (e.g., de Leeuw et al., 2018). Artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques continue to be adopted in areas involving scouting and recruiting, training and performance analysis, revenue management strategies, and broadcasting and streaming decisions, in addition to strategic and tactical decisions “on the field” ( Rein and Memmert, 2016 Joshi, 2019). The practical and widespread use of sports analytics continues to increase across the entire industry. Additionally, by altering the decision-making “frame,” specific scenarios are illustrated where a coach can use these machine learning discovered relationships to influence end-of-regulation game decisions that may increase their likelihood of winning whether in regulation time or in overtime.

The study found evidence that point spread (as an indicator of team strength) and red zone offense performance of both teams were useful to predict game results. In revisiting this analysis of overtime games using both logistic regression and inductive learning/decision tree analysis, the study validates there remains no advantage to the defense first strategy in overtime. Over the past decade, even with significant transformation of new offensive and defensive strategies, college football coaches still opt for the same conventional wisdom strategy. Previous research ( Rosen and Wilson, 2007) found little to suggest that the predominantly used strategy of going on defense first was advantageous. The present overtime rules for tie games in Division I-A college football was adopted in 1996. Division I-A College Football overtime games. This paper reports on the use of machine learning techniques, applying it to analysis of U.S. The use of AI and machine learning in sports is increasingly prevalent, including their use for in-game strategy and tactics.

Department of Management Science and Information Systems, Spears School of Business, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, United States.

College football touchdown