Notes from the Sports Nerds
New Team Rankings Site is Live
- 4 comments - Site Updates - posted by tom on 08.13.09
In preparation for football season 2009-10, we’ve started a number of product initiatives that will roll out in the upcoming weeks and months. One of these initiatives is to update our web site design, both to address some issues and constraints we faced with the last version, as well as to incorporate the latest inspiration from our favorite data-centric web sites.
In short, we’re moving from a “flashier” (and it’s a real stretch to call our old site design that, but relatively, it’s true…) and more rigid design to one that is more spartan, extensible, and fast. We are intentionally making our site design more boring, because it will enable us to roll out new features more quickly and do cooler things in the future with data visualization.
A simpler design also has the benefit of being much easier to read, and we have a number of older users who hopefully will appreciate that.
One major caveat we need to mention is that we are nowhere near done with this effort. In fact, we plan to make design and layout improvements multiple times weekly for the foreseeable future. (First order of business is improving the navigation design.)
Nevertheless, it’s always good to get out of your comfort zone, so our preference is always to launch something as soon as we think it meets a minimum threshold of acceptance, and iterate from there.
So please let us know what you like and don’t like about this new site design. We already have a long list of improvements we plan to start making, and we’d love as much user input as we can get.
Printable NCAA Tournament Brackets Posted
- 8 comments - NCAA Basketball, Site Updates - posted by tom on 02.23.09
You know the best time of the year is almost upon when we put up our free printable NCAA brackets page. As usual, TeamRankings.com is your source for March Madness bracket sheets for the 2009 NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
We are offering three versions of our free printable tournament brackets in 2009:
- A free printable NCAA bracket in Adobe PDF format
- A blank March Madness bracket sheet in JPEG format
- An all-new Microsoft Excel NCAA bracket file you can save, print, and update yourself
While you’re loading up on free printable brackets, make sure to check out our 2009 NCAA bracket odds page too. We update our round-by-round survival odds at least once a week based on the latest game results and team power ratings, and there was a significant shift today. After losing to Maryland in overtime, North Carolina is no longer the top-odds favorite to win the NCAA championship.
Taking the top spot in NCAA tournament champion odds are the Pittsburgh Panthers, with 21.3% odds to win it all in April. The Tar Heels are still close behind with 17.7% champion odds.
Want to know where your team stands? Check out 2009 NCAA bracket odds for all of our projected NCAA tournament teams. And stay tuned for more exciting announcements as the 2009 NCAA tournament inches closer…
We’ve Got the 2009 Conference Tournaments Covered!
- 0 comments - NCAA Basketball, Site Updates - posted by matt on 02.12.09
As you know, before the Madness we have some business to take care of – and so tonight we released a brand-new section to the NCAA Basketball section to cover the 2009 Conference Tournaments. We have all 30 conference tournaments covered from the ACC Tournament to the WCC Tournament.
For each tournament we’ve created a page that will serve as your home base between now and the championship game. To start, we are launching with two pieces of content: up-to-date conference standings and bracket odds for the currently projected participants.
As you know every tournament is structured slightly different – don’t worry, we’ve poured through the bracket setups and our bracket odds correctly take into account first round byes (and even multiple round byes like the new Big East Tournament format that now includes all 16 teams).
Projected seeds and bracket odds are updated every day.
Finally, some of our users will be happy to hear that with this release we are also fixing a discrepancy with our team records. As many support emails can attest, users were sometimes confused because our team records only took into account Division I games. That has now been corrected. Although we only provide predictions and breakdowns for games between Division I schools, a team’s record will now correctly reflect all games played in the current season.
Gearing Up for March Madness – New NCAA Tournament Section
- 0 comments - NCAA Basketball, Site Updates - posted by matt on 02.10.09
You may have noticed that we reorganized our tab structure this week. We’ve reordered the sports to reflect current interest in NCAA Basketball and NBA. We’ve also added a new NCAA Tournament tab.
The NCAA Tournament tab will be the home to all of our 2009 NCAA Tournament coverage, including BracketBrains when it is released in a few weeks. For now, the NCAA Tournament section contains bracket odds, power ratings and RPI ratings for a projected tournament bracket. We will be releasing more content over the coming days and weeks.
The NCAA bracket odds table lists the percentage odds for each 2009 NCAA tournament team to reach successive rounds of the NCAA tournament bracket.
Using win odds calculations derived from our power ratings, we analyze the likelihood and expected outcome of every possible path to the NCAA championship for each tournament team, and then compute overall percentage odds for each team to survive each round.
We update projected seeds on Monday mornings; round-by-round NCAA bracket odds, the power ratings and RPI ratings are updated daily.
Rotation #s Added to Prediction Pages & GameZone
- 0 comments - Site Updates - posted by matt on 01.31.09
We received some feedback from users that it would be helpful to have rotation numbers on our prediction pages and in GameZone. For those not aware, rotation numbers are specific numbers assigned to each team/participant in a sporting matchup. The same values are used throughout the North American sports betting industry.
We’re happy to announce that rotation numbers can now be found on our Prediction pages, GameZone win picks, GameZone ATS picks and in the GameZone matchup tool.
1) Prediction page rotation numbers – the top number corresponds to the favorite and the bottom corresponds to the opponent.
2) GameZone Dashboard
3) GameZone matchup analysis tool – rotation numbers are located in the Adjust Lines box
Please let us know if there are other locations on the site where it would be helpful to see the rotation numbers and we’ll do our best to incorporate.
2 New Enhancements: Improved Sorting & Revamped Prediction Pages
- 2 comments - Site Updates - posted by matt on 01.30.09
Tom is going to continue introducing our new NBA GameZone and NCAA Basketball GameZone products over the next few days.
In the meantime, I thought I’d jump in quick to point out two changes we’ve made to make your day-to-day TeamRankings.com experience better.
1- Improved Table Sorting
As the screen shot above details, we’ve added in-line table sorting across most of our site pages. In addition to faster response time on table sorts, the new functionality also allows you to view the data in new ways. You can sort alphabetically be team name or, as the screen shot shows, sort teams by the highest Overall Power Ranking they’ve reached this season to see how the upper echelon is currently performing.
Sorting can now be found on our power rankings and stats pages.
NBA Power Rankings | NBA Stats
NCAA Basketball Power Rankings | NCAA Basketball Stats
2- Improved Predictions Pages & Enhanced Performance Tracking
We’ve made a number of improvements to our predictions pages. In addition to the in-line table sorting mentioned above, we’ve tried to clean things up to make these important pages easier to follow:
a. Each page now consists of 4 sections: ATS Predictions, ATS Performance, Straight Up Predictions and Straight Up Performance. The Predictions pages show you the latest picks using the TeamRankings.com algorithms. The Performance pages summarize how those picks have performed this season broken done by season, past 3 weeks, past week and daily.
b. Speaking of the Performance page, you’ll notice that the dates in the detail section are now clickable. As you know, we believe strongly in transparency – so these links now provide you a game-by-game breakdown of which picks were right and which were wrong.
c. The game-by-game historical breakdown. Green check means the prediction was correct. Red “x” means it was wrong. Couldn’t be simpler.
d. Finally, we cleaned up the overall UI of the picks page incorporating the in-line table sorting and the calendar control we’ve used elsewhere on the site. We’ve also included an easy link for each game to analyze your own predictions further with our GameZone tool.
New NBA picks page | New NCAA Basketball picks page
New NBA and NCAA Basketball Pages
- 1 comments - Site Updates - posted by tom on 01.26.09
For the past couple weeks we’ve been working on a few projects that came to fruition (the first incarnations, at least) this weekend. There’s a lot to swallow here, so we’ll spread it over a couple blog posts this week.
First, we’re happy to announce the launch of our new NBA home page and NCAA basketball home page.
Despite having a ton of basketball information spread across the site, we had given ourselves about a C- grade at effectively surfacing a variety of valuable, interesting, and/or fun summary data on our league home pages. We’re hoping this latest upgrade gets us to at least a B/B+.
Our league home pages receive a significant percentage of our traffic. At least half of it is from casual surfers who are newcomers to our site, and they have a wide range of interests and reasons for visiting.
Since it’s hard to know exactly what every surfer wants, a primary design goal for landing pages like our league pages is to reduce what is known in Internet nerd terms as “bounce rate” — the percentage of visitors to your site that show up, view one page, decide your site sucks, and leave.
Consequently, we sought to better highlight the broad range of NBA and NCAA basketball information and tools we offer, and to enable users to drill down and explore specific information that catches their eye. It’s kind of like how supermarkets build fancy fruit displays hoping that if the bananas and oranges don’t grab you, the kiwis just might.
Our fruits on offer now include hot games, upcoming matchups and lines, biggest/tightest spreads, highest/lowest totals lines, current top 10 lists for 10 different power rankings, current top 10 lists for 10 different stats, a stats link library, best home teams, best away teams, teams with strong momentum, teams with weak momentum, and more.
We are also updating our new league pages multiple times per day with the latest lines, results, and rankings updates. So check them out and let us know what you think.
New NBA home page | New NCAA Basketball home page
Basketball Stats Galore
- 0 comments - NCAA Basketball, Site Updates - posted by tom on 01.16.09
We’ve been mired in the Team Rankings data dungeons for the last several weeks, getting our heads around the veritable cornucopia (yes I said that) of hoops stats that we’ve always wanted to include on TeamRankings.com. More and better data don’t just entertain users and benefit do-it-yourself handicappers; we also can include them in our predictive models and tools.
(Of course, it’s also pretty fun to keep tabs on who the biggest hacking teams in college basketball are.)
Anyhow, we recently unveiled a little piece of basketball stat heaven, launching our newly updated NBA stats and NCAA basketball stats sections. In addition to offering more than 40 quantitative measures of team performance (60+ for NBA), our new stats libraries also include a wide variety of tempo adjusted (or “tempo-free”) metrics. The page design is still rough with just a laundry list of stats on the left, but in the spirit of quick iteration, we’ll fix that soon.
For those not familiar with tempo-adjusted stats, in short, they represent a far more powerful way of gauging the performance level of a team; instead of looking at stats on a per-game basis, they measure on a per-possession basis.
For example, the personal fouls stat I linked to above doesn’t just show average team fouls per game. Rather, it gauges the percentage of total possessions (team possessions + opponent possessions) during which a team committed a personal foul.
The theory here is that the number of possessions per game varies widely depending on the respective paces of two opposing teams. If a team like VMI has played most games at a very fast pace, their per-game scoring is likely not very relevant for predicting how many points the Keydets will score against Princeton (a notoriously slow-paced team). With tempo-adjusted stats, a more granular prediction methodology emerges: first try to predict the number of total possessions that will occur in a game between two given teams, then use tempo-adjusted stats to simulate, effectively, how the game is likely to play out.
This approach is the basis of our relatively new “SmartStats” simulation model that we rolled out in our BracketBrains tool for last year’s March Madness. This year, we’re hoping to get that model out before the NCAA tournament so our subscribers can also apply it to regular season college basketball games and…drum roll please…NBA games too.
At Last: NBA and NCAA Basketball Predictions
- 2 comments - Site Updates - posted by tom on 12.30.08
Algorithmic NBA predictions and NCAA basketball predictions have launched. Initially, we are making predictions for every game, every day, and projecting both the win odds of each team and expected margin of victory (MOV).
By comparing MOV projections to current point spreads, bettors can get an idea of the relative difference between what we think will happen and what Vegas thinks will happen. (We calculate this difference, in points, in the “Difference” column on the predictions pages.) The greater the difference, the greater the inefficiency in the line according to our model.
However, note that this model does not take into account recent injuries, so always be on the lookout for injury situations that may skew betting lines and mislead the model.
Next up, we plan to launch a new and improved GameZone for both NBA and NCAA basketball in January, which will incorporate a broad variety of stats, additional prediction models, and other nifty goodies.
College Football BowlZone is Live
- 0 comments - Site Updates - posted by tom on 12.15.08
Over the past three weeks we have put in a big push to cover the upcoming college football bowl season in far greater depth than we ever have before. This week we launched the fruits of our labor: the all-new College Football BowlZone.
BowlZone is jam packed with head to head stats, written analysis, and algorithmic predictions for all 34 of the upcoming 2008-2009 college football bowl games. In addition to five data rich pages of content on every matchup, we have included projections from three different predictive models we employ and expanded our statistical coverage to include powerful “per-play” based efficiency stats.
Whether you are looking for some quick opinions on the bowl games or can’t wait to break down the key stats on all 68 bowl teams, give BowlZone a whirl. Let us know what you think!