Happy Birthday, New Rankings: You’re No Longer In Beta

As long time TR users know, our “New Ratings” have been around a for a while, and aren’t exactly “new” at this point. In fact, they were announced three years ago today.

To celebrate their birthday, and because we’re now confident that they’re ready for prime time, we’re making a few changes.

What’s Changing?

1. We’re removing “(Beta)” from the end of their name.

It’s like moving from a learner’s permit to real driver’s license.

2. We’re now using them on team and matchup pages.

Our new default power rating for team pages and matchup pages is the Predictive Rating from our New Ratings suite, so you’ll now see “Predictive Rank” where you used to see our old “Overall Rank”.

Unlike our previous Overall rankings, the new Predictive Rating is designed to be the best predictor of future games, so it relies heavily on margin of victory, and virtually ignores a team’s win-loss record.

Here are links to each sport:

Wherever you see a power rating or a corresponding ranking on a team page or matchup page, unless it’s specifically labeled otherwise, it ought to be our New Predictive rating.

In addition, wherever you see a list of various power ratings on a team or matchup page (e.g. Predictive Rating, Home Rating, Away Rating, Last 5 Rating, etc), those ought to be from our New Ratings suite.

3.  They now get top billing in our Rankings section.

If you click “Rankings” in the top navigation menu or “Team Rankings” in the left sidebar menu for any sport, you’ll be taken to a list of all the power rankings flavors we publish. On that page, the “New” rankings are on the top, and the “Old” rankings are on the bottom.

In addition, the somewhat new NFL “mega menu” has direct links to 10 different flavors of our New Ratings, from the Predictive rating down through the NFL Luck Rating.

NFL mega menu

The Difference Between Our Old And New Ratings

This article explains it best, but essentially the main ways the New Ratings are an improvement over the Old Ratings are:

  • They incorporate preseason projections. This is most important at the beginning of a season, and keeps the ratings from getting too skewed by one early fluke result.
  • Zero equals average. An average team will have a rating of 0, and the ratings are expressed in “points versus average”. So for all new ratings positive numbers are better than average, and negative numbers are worse than average.
  • Our testing shows the New Predictive rankings are more accurate than the Old Predictive rankings when it comes to predicting the results of future games, especially early in the season.

Where Can I Find The Old Ratings?

Don’t worry, if you use the Old Ratings as part of your analysis, you’ll still be able to do that. You can find them listed on the bottom half of the main rankings page for each sport.

The old rating that we used most often around the site was the Overall rating. Here are links to the old Overall ratings for each sport:

In closing, we want to give a big TR round of applause to team member Austin Link, who was the driving force behind our New Ratings project.