Robots Watching Football: A New Way to Use the Ranker

Thursday, December 31, 2015

A New Way to Use the Ranker

Just in time for New Years and the end of the 2015 post-season, I've finished a draft of my ranker. It all runs via JavaScript now, and you can choose the functions to customize it yourself.

Options:

Choose the season. Currently I've got the 2015 regular season and 2015 with the post-season.
Choose the maximum margin of victory.
Choose the function that evaluates the win factor based on the margin of victory.

Here's the ranker:
http://turing.plymouth.edu/~kgb1013/collegeFootball/cfbRanking.php

Pros: It all works and you can play around with the settings yourself.

Cons: It takes a long time to run with the settings you choose. It will freeze your browser while running.

Enjoy!

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Ranker Properties

Some important facts about the ranking algorithm used here:

* The dates of the games are independent. Losing early in the season is just as detrimental as losing later in the season.

* Prior ranking does not affect the value of a matchup. If a team is ranked number 1 early on, but then lose their first week, the team that beats them does not get any bonus for beating them while they were ranked high. The value of that win will change every week.

* It does not pay attention to whether a game was Home or Away. (This is the most reasonable change to the algorithm that could be made, I believe.)

* It does not care what league or division each team is in. This means that often non-FBS teams appear on the Top 25 Overall list. One problem with this is that I can't easily "harvest" the NAIA results for this blog. If you know of a way to do that, please let me know so I can add those results! Currently there are some NAIA teams that appear because they play NCAA teams, but their schedules are incomplete.

Possible Future Features

Some functionality I would like to add:

* A record of the number of upsets and points-in-upsets each week.

* Comparison of this list to other lists (BCS, AP, Blogpoll, USA) by showing relative differences for teams, as well as comparing the number of upsets per week.

* An interactive page for tinkering with the parameters so visitors can try out alternative rankings. (This one will likely be the hardest!)

Sadly, I'm always quite busy in the fall, which is when I'm also most motivated to make changes!