Welcome!
What is the goal for this site?
Hopefully, this will be a source of information about computer rating and ranking systems used in sports. My goal is to provide links to ranking systems that are available on the web, archives of some historical material about computer ranking methods, links to score and schedule data, legacy source code, and more.
There are quite a few people who know more about this than I do, but it takes a village. Hopefully I can provide a unique contribution with this site.
Items below [in brackets] are links to be added. I began this project in late December 2023, don't have a lot of spare time, and there is a ton of work to do, lots of pages to develop, and many words to write. Please be patient as I get this site off the ground.
Most important content here
- A list of known rating systems, with links to their pages
- A history of computer rankings that were part of the Bowl Championship Series
- Suggestions about finding your own score and schedule data are in progress...
- About 20% done: thoughts and suggestions on how to create your own system
Most important links to elsewhere
- Kenneth Massey's College Football Ranking Composite and Men's College Baksetball Ranking Composite
- Todd Beck's invaluable The Prediction Tracker, with daily aggregation of predictions from lots of different systems for NBA, NFL, and college football & basketball. His site also has 20 years of data about which systems have performed best both in predicting winners and "against the spread"
Favorite systems of mine
(There's more to add here... working on it...)
David L. Wilson
Insert bio from David's website
Here is David's [original explanation of his system], preserved from his University of Wisconsin website. I've also saved his C source code which still works (with lots of warnings). I still run his ratings for college football and basketball, over on my own ratings site.
David Rothman & FACT
David (1935-2004) was the founder of the Foundation for the Analysis of Competitions and Tournaments (FACT) and provided his rankings to the early years of the BCS, before they chose to abandon margin of victory in their systems. David was a frequent attendee of sports analytics conferences, presenting papers at ___ and ___, among others. [His Wikipedia page] has a more complete biography.
There is a collection of [random writings] of David's which explain his philosophy on how to rate and rank teams.
If you want to run his ratings for yourself, well, be ready to go back in time: his source code, at least the version I have, is written in BASIC! That means it works great on retro computers (think: Windows 98 and older); in the present era, you'll need DOSBox or QB64. If you want to know more about how to do this, reach out to me as I've had success on both new and old (back to 486) machines.
Dr. Peter Wolfe produces the Rothman rankings during college football and men's basketball seasons, and I produce them for [other sports: links] in addition to those.
Systems used in the Bowl Championship Series (will have its own page)
How to create your own ranking (will have its own page)
Suggestions or Comments?
If you have suggestions or non-hateful comments for this page, feel free to reach out via email. I'm just getting this site going, so there is lots of work to do. Thanks in advance for your feedback.
Quick Links
• Want to create your own ranking?
• Want to browse other ranking systems?
• ...including this author's?
• More to add here...