Ratings Explanation

The first thing you should know about this system is that it is designed to be
purely predictive. If youre looking for a system that rates teams on how
good their season has been, youve come to the wrong place. There are
enough systems out there that rank teams based on what is good by just
about any definition you can think of. So Id encourage you to google
college basketball ratings or even try the opinion polls for something that is
more your style.

The purpose of this system is to show how strong a team would be if it

played tonight, independent of injuries or emotional factors. Since nobody
can see every team play all (or even most) of their games, this system is
designed to give you a snapshot of a teams current level of play.

This season, I scrapped the old A-B=C power ratings and went to
something that appears a little more complex. It is a little more complex, but
it also has the advantage of being based on basketball things. The old
system I used wasnt special for hoops. It could be applied to any sport
where a score is kept. Be it the NHL, college lacrosse, or grandmas bridge
league. But now we have the technology to do better. Besides, there are
plenty of other power ratings of the old style out there, if thats what you
really prefer. I dont really do this to imitate what everyone else does.

I would describe the philosophy of the system as this: it looks at who a

team has beaten and how they have beaten them. Same thing on the
losses, also. Yes, it values a 20 point win more than a 5 point win. It likes a
team that loses a lot of close games against strong opposition more than
one that wins a lot of close games against weak opposition.

The core of the system is the pythagorean calculation for expected winning
percentage. In previous experiments, I found the best exponent for college
basketball was between 8 and 9. But for whatever reason, when using
adjusted efficiencies, the best exponent is between 11 and 12, probably
because previous experiments only included conference games. I am using
11.5 as the exponent.
How did I determine the best exponent? I applied the log5 formula to every
game last season and found the exponent with the best fit for expected
winning percentages. (A problem here is that I applied the final ratings
retroactively to the last seasons results, so its a little high for predictive
purposes. This will be revisited eventually.) You can get an idea of the
chance one team beats another by applying the log5 formula to the two
teams pythagorean rating. There is a home court advantage consideration,
also. More on that, later.

The inputs into the pythagorean equation are the teams adjusted offensive
and defensive efficiencies. Any time you see something adjusted on this
site, it refers to how a team would perform against average competition at a
neutral site. For instance, a teams offensive efficiency (points scored per
100 possessions) is adjusted for the strength of the opposing defenses
played. I compute an adjusted offensive efficiency for each game by
multiplying the teams raw offensive efficiency by the national average
efficiency and dividing by the opponents adjusted defensive efficiency. The
adjusted game efficiencies are then averaged (with more weighting to
recent games) to produce the final adjusted offensive efficiency.

While the pythagorean winning percentage is calibrated to the likelihood of

winning, the efficiencies are based purely on scoring per possession with
no consideration of winning or losing. This allows us to get both a chance
of winning and a predicted final score with the system, and makes the
system much more predictive than if we ignored scoring margin. It also has
the advantage of giving a rating in offensive and defensive terms, and an
SOS in those terms, as well. Want to know which team has faced the
toughest defenses? Well, with my system you can.

Now lets do this in Q&A form based on e-mail Ive received.

How do you cap margin of victory?

This is the most obvious problem with the system - there is no cap on
margin of victory. Its not that Im particularly comfortable with it, but Ive
looked at quite a few ways to limit the impact of MOV, and I havent found
one that I like, yet. Ill find something someday, but until then we have to
deal with things like Georgia being ranked 11th and Oklahoma being
ranked 17th at this point (12/10/06) in the season. More games will push
these teams to their rightful location.

How do you incorporate home court advantage?

I add 1.4% to the home teams OE and visiting teams DE, and subtract the
same amount from the opposite parameters.

What do all the columns mean?

The new ones are Cons (Consistency) and Luck. The easiest one to
understand is Luck, which is the deviation in winning percentage between a
teams actual record and their expected record using the correlated
gaussian method. The luck factor has nothing to do with the rating
calculation, but a team that is very lucky (positive numbers) will tend to be
rated lower by my system than their record would suggest.

Consistency is basically the standard deviation of scoring difference by

game for a team. Again, its not included in the ratings calculation. It can be
an aid in determining which teams are overrated by my system. Highly
rated teams that are inconsistent tend to look beatable more often. As of
this writing, Georgia is ranked 329 in consistency and Oklahoma is at 334.
Theyve played their best games against poor teams, and their worst
against good ones.

Ideally, Id synthesize the consistency and rating into one number, but I
havent found a way Im comfortable with. So right now, Im throwing this
system out there with all its warts for everyone to see. The warts tend to
decrease as more games are played, but at least Ive made you aware of
them and where they can pop up.

Strength of Schedule now has three columns. Its potentially more

confusing, but worth it in the end. The way I compute SOS is to average
the opponents offensive and defensive ratings and to apply the
pythagorean calculation to them to rank the overall schedules. So those are
the three columns you see, Pyth (Overall SOS), AdjO (Opponents average
adjusted offensive efficiency), and AdjD (Opponents average adjusted
defensive efficiency). When comparing the offensive performance of
players on different teams, theres quite a bit of an advantage having their
average opponents defense quantified. Theres also a column for
non-conference SOS which attempts to capture the portion of the schedule
under a schools control. Thus, no postseason or conference games are
included in that calculation.