Book excerpt: Optimal Sports Math, Statistics, and Fantasy provides the sports community --students, professionals, and casual sports fans --with the essential mathematics and statistics required to objectively analyze sports teams, evaluate player performance, and predict game outcomes. These techniques can also be applied to fantasy sports competitions. Readers will learn how to: * Accurately rank sports teams * Compute winning probability * Calculate expected victory margin * Determine the set of factors that are most predictive of team and player performance. The book also provides readers with modeling techniques that can be used to decode and demystify the mysterious computer ranking schemes that are often employed by post-season tournament selection committees in college and professional sports. Our techniques provide readers with a verifiable and unbiased approach to evaluate and rank teams, and the proper statistical procedures to test and evaluate the accuracy of different models. Optimal Sports Math, Statistics, and Fantasy provides readers with a proven best-in-class quantitative modeling framework with numerous applications throughout the sports world.