Tips on Using and Navigating TeamRankings.com

If this is your first time looking at TeamRankings.com, thanks for coming by. There's a lot of information on the site, and I know that some of it can be a little confusing at first. Hopefully this page will give you a good starting point on what to look at and how to use it

Predictions

A lot of people come to this site trying to figure out whether their team is likely to win their next game. If this is what you're here for, there are several pages you might want to take a look at. The first is the daily predictions page. This page breaks down each game both by expected margin of victory, and by the odds that each team will win. For instance:

#6	Kentucky (18-7)	60.837%	+2.1860
#39	Arkansas (16-9)	39.162%

means that Kentucky has about a 60.8% chance of beating Arkansas, and that they're expected to win by about two points. For more in-depth analysis, the best place to look is on each team's power rating page. Just click on the team link on the predictions page, or on any other page, to see how the team has fared at home, on the road, or at neutral sites. Scroll further down, and you'll see how the team has fared if only wins - no margin of victory considerations - are taken into account - the "Wins Ratings", or if only margin of victory is taken into account - the "Points Ratings. Another useful value is a team's Last Ten Rating, which looks only at their results of the last ten games. For future game predictions and a game-by-game breakdown of past games, scroll down to the bottom of a team's page, or click on the Predictions for Future Games link.

You Got My Team's Record Wrong!

A lot of people email me to say that I've gotten a team's record wrong. Sometimes, they're right, and I've missed a game or two. I very much appreciate corrections of this sort, and can't always manage to check every single detail. Keep in mind, however, that I don't include non-Division I games for college sports, so before emailing me, please be sure this isn't the issue. I also get a lot of email saying something like "you said my team is 0-0 against top 25 teams, but they actually beat...". In my record versus top 5, top 10, etc., I use the ratings for the page you're looking at, not the AP poll or any other rankings.

Projecting the NCAA Tournament

Another use of TeamRankings.com is in figuring out what teams will make it into the NCAA Tournament, and where they'll be seeded. The first place to look for this information is my my projected brackets page, where I look through everybody's results, and based on the NCAA Selection Committee's rules, take my best guess as to how things will look when the pairings are announced. To do this, I look at a lot of things. The NCAA uses the RPI (Ratings Percentage Index) as a gauge of how good teams are, who they've beaten, and who they've lost to. Unfortunately, the RPI is not a very good model of how good teams really are, and as a result, we've seen the Selection Committee stray further and further from their use. Last season, the Team Rankings Power Ratings were actually a lot closer to the actual seeds of teams in the NCAA Tournament than were the RPI. To the best of my knowledge, the NCAA does not use my rankings in their seeding process (though the Women's NIT does); this is merely an artifact of a group of people converging to a more reasonable set of conclusions.

Some of the other important tools I use are a team's rating for its last ten games, which is looked at closely by the committee, and their performance on the road and at neutral sites. To compare teams individually, it certainly makes sense to look at each team's page, and at how they stack up in each of these regards. If you have a strong opinion, or want to see what others have to say, have a look at the Message Board.

Filling Out Your Brackets

The tips for filling out your brackets are similar to those for predicting individual games, but there are some additional resources available for the NCAA Tournament. The NCAA Tournament Odds page features the chance that each team will make it to a certain round. So if you want to determine what the chances are that the Big South champion will make the Final Four (they're small!), or that Stanford or Indiana or UCLA will make the Crazy Eight, check that page out. Prior to the tournament, I use the projected brackets, so that you can see what the odds are that a certain team would win the championship, go to the Final Four, etc., if the brackets were just as I project them to be. From that page, you can also link to each team's NCAA Tournament page, which has the odds of winning and the predicted margin of victory against every other team in the field. When the actual brackets come out, I'll include both a TeamRankings computer prediction bracket, and my own personal picks. Good luck!