The Ratings of Team Rankings

The main ratings use all factors of a game: who won, the score, how recently the game was played, where the game was played, and who the game was played against, to come up with a single rating for each team. For more description of the ranking algorithm, see how we rank teams.

The points/predictive ratings incorporate only game scores, not the winner or loser. However, there is a diminishing returns principle here: the difference between a 1-point win and a 1-point loss is far greater than the difference between an 18-point win and a16-point win.

The wins ratings incorporate only wins and losses -- margin of victory is not factored in at all.

The home, away, and neutral ratings score teams on how well they've done in home, away, and neutral games. They assume a certain home advantage, meaning that they are all "centered" at the same place.

League and non-league ratings incorporate only divisional games, and rate teams based on their performance against that group of teams.

Home advantage is an indication of how much better (or worse) a team has played at home, versus on the road.

Upward Stability and Downward Stability provide a measure of how "sure" the rankings are, in both the positive and negative directions. That is, a team with high Upward Stability is probably ranked pretty accurately, and should not be ranked too much higher. A team with low Upward Stability, on the other hand, is not very well entrenched in its place, and could be considerably better than the rankings indicated. This generally is the case for teams that haven't played many games, or teams that have mainly played against teams of vastly different levels.

Strength of Schedule is a measure of how difficult a team's schedule has been, relative to a random assortment of teams from their entire sport. It's worth noting here that what may be a very difficult schedule for one team is only moderately difficult for another.

RPI ratings are used by the NCAA in seeding basketball teams for the NCAA Tournament. I publish them only reluctantly, as I believe they are an extremely poorly constructed ranking system.