BS Rankings

Took a minute to see what happened if I averaged all the rankings folks over on BigSoccer are generating (2 Elo rankings and 2 numeric systems in total), and I've got to say, it looks pretty good. Let's just call em BS Rankings. I may try to do this weekly.

Teams ranked first by mean rank, then by median rank if tied, and if still tied, ranked by standard deviation of ranks, lowest to highest. Click to embiggen.

I actually think the combined rankings look better than any of the individual ones. I was impressed. The craziest thing to me is the team tiering. i.e. RSL is clear #1, Seattle is clear #2 , LA and MIFC are interchangable, Colorado, SKC, RBNY and Portland are all interchangable, Dallas, Chicago, San Jose, New England and Philadelphia are all basically interchangable, then there's Houston, then Vancouver, then Columbus and Chivas are interchangable, then Toronto and DC.

What is this I dont even

Sort of a weird week this time around. Montreal just can't quite grab that #1 spot. I think it's the games in hand that's holding them back, believe it or not. Colorado my big surprise of the week, jumping up 3 places. I triple checked to make sure it wasn't an error... seems legit. This is what happens when you weight recent form more heavily, I guess. Kansas City continuuing the gradual fall, and Chivas only staying out of the basement thanks to Toronto and DC.

Table.

Graph.

I may well fall behind on this in the coming weeks, gonna have a second kid born on Wednesday(plus or minus a day or so) so who knows how much sleep I'll get... we'll see.

6 hours of no power!? Eat the children first.

Actually, no, I didn't lose power in the storm last night, though it sounds like a lot of people in the area did. We'll see how we fare tonight though...

Speaking of faring well, how about those Sounders, eh? Not too shabby.

The two midweek games threw this off a bit. Kansas City actually drops a little bit, despite picking up two road results (well, you can argue the DC one I guess). Mostly RSL's domination helped them up. LA moves up despite losing, again, helped by crushing Philadelphia midweek. Dallas still holding on to the top spot, Chivas droppping like a rock. With three Ps. How's that for not caring about spelling or typos?

Overall rankings look pretty good to me. SKC perhaps a bit low.

Here's the table.

And here's the graph. starting to see some real movement and trends here. Next week should be interesting for some teams.

I did what I swore I wouldn't...

So I told myself this season I was going to stick with the same methodology that I started with. And I thought I really meant it. But then I came up with something better. So I'm changing. I'm sorry. It's not you, it's me. Or something.

While the system had been working pretty well so far, it still didn't seem to capture 'momentum' shifts all that well. However, Itried to compensate that with adding a Flavor of the Week ranking syste. I've ultimatly decided that the 'mashup' system, using both systems and then combining the rankings, was probably the best, and when comparing it to how other sites rank teams, it looks like it's doing a better job.

Remember, these are still purely numerical, data driven rankings, that don't hvae any input from me other than results. I think it's become a very good way to creating "power rankings" that mirror what "experts" are saying and is backed up by results and not just hand waving mumbo jumbo.

Anyway, enough exposition. Let's check the numbers.

I'd note that I also did back calculate "mashup" rankings for each team over the course of the season. This will do away with the need for some of the extraneous info I had been providing earlier. From now on it'll just be teams rankings and movemnet form the last week and a chart showing ranking position over the course of the season.

Numbers. Yes. Here.

Dallas still at the top, New York with a big jump, and both LA teams with big falls (poor Chivas ;/ ).

Here's the graph for the full season. Check out Vancouver. What a crazy poor season they've had... Click to embiggen, I'm trying to go with a .png to see if that makes it prettier.

 Annnnd... that's all I have to say about that. More fun next week. Until then... courage.

Snow? In May? I hate everything.

Plus I left my Kindle in Philadelphia and they're charging me $32 to ship it. $32!!! I'm even a Marriott Gold member! Insane. Crazy. Whatever.

Okay, so nothing too drastic this week except things starting to shake out like they should. Chivas in free fall, almost crashed out of the top 10, and LA comes back down to a reasonable rating. Below 200,000 is what I expect from just about everyone unless they're really flying, so we'll see what next week brings. San Jose the surprise poor performers of the year, and Kansas City keeps putting together the right result at the right time to stay in the top tier. Here's how the numbers looked this week.

Three folks tied on 9. I like how they're sorted right now, but if you think it should be different, just use the power of mental visualization to do whatever the hell you want, I don't care.

Here's the FOTW ranks. Looks pretty good to me as well.

And, last and least, the SHFR graph. I'm debating when I should switch it from log to regular, but for consistency, I'll keep it log for at least another week or two. Click to embiggen.

They have the plant, but we have the Power

Sorry I'm late. I'm out of town and working. I don't owe you anything. YOU CANT MAKE ME DO ANYTHING.

Also I'm tired.

No witty commentary. Here's numbers.

SHFR graph.

Week 9's flavor of the week. A little surprised SKC is still ranked so high. Two good weeks are keeping them up, they should be falling soon...

Where my boats at?

One more iteration in the books. Not a whole lot to say really. Midweek games throw a small little wrench into the system so Kansas City maybe "dinged" a bit more than they should after the cross country road trip while NY gets a bit of a bonus bump despite the midweek loss, but the rankings actually look pretty good to me. Chicago and Seattle almost out of the basement and DC and New England in need of some results, and quick. LA a bit vindicated in maintaining the top spot.

The numbers.

The handy dandy chart.

And the flavor of the week. A little surprised to see Chivas still so high, actually, but they'll likely drop next week.

Lalala can't hear you etc.

Well that was a bit of a disappoing match. Quick thoughts would be that they need to figure out their shoe situation, as people were sliding all over the place, and I thought Donovan looked really, really good. Also made me wonder if PV going for the win was the right call. I expected bunker and counter from us with a lot of absorbing pressure, but it almost seemed the other way around. 3 points from a game-on-each-coast-back-to-back road trip is still good, but 4 would have been... well, one better.

Still, can't complain too much, LA is a very good team and can be tough to beat at home. Here's player ratings for the match.

Man of the match to Donovan for a great performance. He just may be back.

Tip of the hat to Matt Besler, SKC's best performer on the night.

Deluxe Apartment

A fair amount of mvoement this week in the rankings, though no one making major jumps. This is probably a good thing. Now that we've hit the "magic" five game mark I expect to see this sort of thing. Teams gliding up or down based on results and things starting to shake out. LA still at the #1 spot soley on the fact that they started the season so well, but if you check the chart yo ucan see they've been trending down hard.

Some how Chicago lost and still managed to gain points... essentially the system now sees a one goal loss for them as a positive, I guess (combined with some poor results for other basement dwelling teams). I think that's both funny and a little sad...

Anyway, here's how the table looks today.

Here's the graph. Note LA's trend if keeping them at #1 makes you uncomfortable.

And of course now that we're into the season enough, we can figure out a new flavor of the week. And no real surprise here, Dallas has been on a roll.

So there you have it, LA still on top, but just barely... will we have a new champion next week? Only one way to find out.

I'm flying to New York for work this afternoon and will be lucky enough to be in town for the SKC game, so I may not get around to updating this until the following week. Apologies in advance. Until then : courage.

BACKUP YOUR DATA!

Yeah, so I nearly lost everything on my laptop this week... fun stuff. Overnight data recovry worked though and now I've got everything backed up. I actually had it all backed up on my Google Drive accoun anyway (I love you Google Fiber), but was still a scary moment...

Anyway, enough about me, let's look at some numbers. A bit of movement this week. Unfortunatly LA and Seattle both have lagged a game or two behind eveyrone so their ratings still aren't the best, along with New England, but everything else is starting to take shape. Vancouver doing some downward movement and Chivas keeps climbing, along with Portland and Kansas City. LA at the number one spot but slipping a little bit. Still, as the only undefeated team, the math makes their rating look quite good. I imagine that'll settle down in the coming weeks. Montreal not quite out of their spot yet and Houston takes a bit of a hit as well. Chicago not quite doing enough to get out of the basement, though they'll likely jump Seattle next week unless something interesting happens. And what's up with New York?

Speaking of New York, I'll be traveling to the game next week in Harrison. Should be fun, last year was the first time I'd seen SKC win on the road.

Anyway, here's the table.

And now the graph, which is still a little hard to get a handle on, mostly due to LA. Still a log plot as well... Click to bigify.

And now we've got enough games to start doing a Flavor of the Week analysis. This is done in a similar way to the season long power rankigns except it only looks at the last five games. In that way it's more of a snap shot of how teams are performing at this instant and is more variable than the other rankings. Since it's early in the season this only impacts teams that have played six games. Essentially, it's ignoring the first game for those teams, so it's a little different than the season long rankings. It'll get more divergent as the season goes on.

Annnnd... that's all Ihave to say about that.

Goat Parade

So how bout them Chivasesessss huh? Pretty crazy stuff. I think, so far, they've got to be the surprise performance of the season, more so even than the poor start for San Jose. I love it.

Anyway, we've just about achieved normalacy as far as getting everyone to five games goes. Anything you still can't cope with is your own problem.. Next week things should start to look normal.

LA ties and brings them down to earths somewhat. LA has actually been riding that first game four goal pasting to keep their #1 spot, so once that drops off they should start to settle down, unless they manage to do it again... Will they be better with Donovan? Who knows. Chicago hasn't budged from the cellar. Kansas City some how manages to put in a dominant performance and drop a spot (it makes sense mathamatically, just trust me) and Vancouver is starting to drop off after a hot start. Here's the full table.

I think we're just about at the point in the season where we can start making some general statements about teams. I generally think that 5 games is a trend and 10 games is a good enough sample to give you a good idea of what a team is capable of performance wise.

Oh, right, I owe you a graph too, don't I? Here it is.

GODDAMMIT ITS STILL NOT WORKING

Actually, it's staritng to shake out okay. The teams with only two games played still throwing a little wrench in everything though, hence LA still ranked #1 despite their bummer draw with Chivas. And by bummer draw, I mean hell yes Chivas, you beautiful bastard goats you.

Chivas is totally my #3 MLS team.

Anyway, as I said, numbers are starting to shake out well I think if you take the 5 teams with only two games played with a grain of salt. Here's how the table looks.

We'll see how LA looks after another game or two. Same deal with Seattle. Also, this in no way incorporates CCL performance into it, so don't ask.

MEANINGLESS UNFRIENDLIES

So I hesitate to throw my hat into the ring in Week 1 with some power rankings since they're totally unrelated to the Week 0 ones from a bit ago, but I decided, for consitencies sake, I'd try to get in the habbit of doing this every week.

The reason I hesitate is that these ratings really don't get off the ground every team has played five game (they use a five game running average in the formula), so the numbers start off really meaningless and get better as the season goes on. But hell, even if the math is silly, let's just go for it.



Actually nothing too terrible there just yet... But like I said, this is all but meaningless, just based on one game and has no relation to what happened last season or evaluating overall team strength. Give me a few weeks and we might be able to hammer out something a bit better.

Until then?

Courage.

Week 0 Power Rankings

We're baaaaaaack.

Technically, we were never gone. But still.

So, to do the most meaningless of meaningless things, I opted to do one final spreadshet iteration before retiring the 2012 version and starting up a new 2013 one. I ran the power ranking system through the playoffs to determine a final final set of power rankings to use as the starting point for this season. Well, that's not entirely true, this season will actually start with everyone at 0, since I think there's enough parity in MLS to dictate that past season results are no indicator of next season performance. I've even posted about it! But that's under the bridge.

Here's how the numbers worked out :

San Jose	1
Kansas City	2
DC	3
New York	4
LA	5
Houston	6
Seattle	7
Chicago	8
Salt Lake City	9
Columbus	10
Colorado	11
Vancouver	12
Dallas	13
Montreal	14
New England	15
Philadelphia	16
Chivas	17
Portland	18
Toronto	19

Maybe it's blasphemy to not put LA at #1 and Houston at #2 due to their postseason performance, but I simply weighted each post season game as another match. Perhaps I should have given more weighting to each round, but this seemed like the best way to do it. I think I'll be making a few tweeks to the system this year, but otherwise, it should be more or less the same. Stay tuned!

The time is 9:55 AM

You know, I'm just gonna copy-paste this over from Big Soccer today. Because I'm lazy. It's kind of a theme.

So first an apology. I actually thought I was doing great by finishing these up this morning, but then IR ealied there was a mistake in my last ratings. Had the wrong cell selected for one match for almost every team. So the good news is that since it was applied uniformly to every team it didn't make a huge difference upon correction, but there were a few correction. RSL down one instead of down two, columbus down one instead of no chance, chivas down two instead of down one and philadelphia no change instead of up one.

I'm not gonna repost those ratings (unless some one really wants them), but the corrected values are incorporated into this weeks ratings, which should be "accurate", whatever "accurate power rating" means...

Also this is gonna start getting easier to manage as the season winds down so I'm gonna start compiling some stats for teams. If any one has any requests for info they'd like to see, let me know and I'll see what I can grab.

Anyway, at Week 28 not a lot of surprises. New York starting to look like they're rated too high (though their fans seem to be their harshest critics, I still think they're a very solid team), DC starting to look like maybe they belong in the top five after all, and no surprises in the bottom. LA probably has time to climb a bit higher as well, but ratings are starting to level out across the board.

First off, the ratings.

 

Flavor of the week numbers are unsurprising, Chicago and LA playing dominantly as of late along with San Jose.

And, last and least, the season long graph. I may need to truncate this in coming weeks, but we'll see... I sort of like the big version myself, to be honest, but it is getting pretty unwiedly to look at.

Monday again? I thought Monday was last week.

I've almost gotten into a roll with doing these. Scary, huh? Maybe during the office season I'll even write up a nifty little script or something to automate the whole thing and just be done with thought and effort once and for all. Were it so easy.

Anyway, here's the updated spreadsheet incoroprating the last rounds of games into the metric. A few interesting things. RSL still holds onto the top slot, but just barely, which is a bit surprising given their recent run of form and losing a direct match against San Jose. Once again this was sort of intentional as I wanted rankings to change a bit more gradually than how most of the talking heads update their rankings, but maybe in this case it's a bit too slow.

Another anomoly seems to be New York winning against a direct foe and seemingly actually dropping in ranking slightly. This seems to be because a lot of teams actually had slightly better results than their results given other teams slightly beter form then them this week. Because it's a relative system, even a good performance can result in losing some rating when compared to other, great results.

Seattle is just a hair above Chicago but they'll likely be falling a lot if they can't right their ship soon. Same for RSL. Kansas City has fallen to basically the worst of the best level. I'm still hoping a win against Dayton sets up a rematch against Philly.

I've been wondering what it will take to get Toronto to overtake Dallas as well. I feel like TFC will be winning again after the All Star break. Not sure I can say the same for Dallas...

Seattle was this weeks big loser, dropping 0.758 points while LA was the big winner, picking up 0.750. Are they back? Doubtful, but in a parity league with a playoff system all you need to do is limp across the finish line at the end of the season and who knows what can happen...

Anyway, here's the full table.

Week 16
Team	Rank	Weekly Δ	Rating	Weekly Δ
Salt Lake City	1	NC	6.5	-0.567
San Jose	2	NC	6.6875	0.313
DC	3	NC	7.25	-0.117
New York	4	+1	7.5625	-0.029
Kansas City	5	-1	7.8125	-0.613
Vancouver	6	+1	9.3125	-0.446
Seattle	7	-1	9.625	-0.758
Chicago	8	NC	9.6875	0.446
Columbus	9	+1	10.625	-0.158
Houston	10	-1	10.8125	-0.479
Colorado	11	NC	11.25	-0.583
LA	12	+1	12.25	0.750
Chivas	13	-1	12.75	0.117
New England	14	NC	13	0.200
Portland	15	NC	13.25	0.483
Montreal	16	NC	13.3125	0.554
Philadelphia	17	+1	14.4375	0.496
Dallas	18	-1	15	-0.267
Toronto	19	NC	18.4375	0.296

Real Salt Lake will get no crest love this week, as I don't think they deserve it.

LOLLA

Sure, MLS isn't the greatest league in the world, but where else can you see a red card, three goals in the last 20 minutes of the game to win it, and Pirate Beckham getting a yellow for a handball in the box to give up the tying goal on a PK. Great stuff from LA this week, and I love watching them fall to pieces.

A link a day...

I just thought this was a pretty interesting analysis. Basically plots of average player position and passing networks for the LA game.

Central Winger: New way of visualizing the beautiful game

The thing that really jumped out at me was this - "Perhaps a byproduct of Sporting's high-pressure defense, covered in Monday's OPTA Spotlight, Chance Meyers (No. 7) and Seth Sinovic (No. 16) both played higher up the field than their holding midfielder Júlio César (No. 55)."

Of course I think we SKC fans know that our backs really get forward in the attack (leaving us a bit open to the counter, as well, as LAs only good chances demonstrated), but it's cool to see it plotted graphically.

8000 words

A few game day photos. Nothing special.

I love this one. Even my daughter thought the linesman sucked.