Just about a month ago, Harvard hosted the inaugural New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports ( official site , news release ). In perusing the abstracts of conference papers (which can be accessed through the conference website, where it says "Program"), I came across a study (presented in poster format) entitled, "Skill Importance in BYU Women’s Volleyball: A Bayesian Approach." The authors were BYU statistics graduate student Lindsay Florence and professor Gilbert Fellingham . The beginning of the abstract gives the basics of the study: The BYU womens volleyball team recorded all skills (pass, serve-receive, set, etc.), rated each skill, and recorded rally outcomes (point for BYU, rally continues, point for opposition) for the entire 2006 home volleyball season. Only sequences of events occurring on BYU's side of the net were considered. Florence and Fellingham were nice enough to e-mail me a PDF of their poster. It conveys some basic statistic