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.

Dos a cero o Cinco a cero?

So just some quick musings here so I can get everything on paper prior to the match, in order to maintain what little credibility I have (which is 0, I believe...).

First off, I did just iterate the "Power Rankings" for the Hex I've got. Here's how the table looks.

Team	Rank	Rating
Costa Rica	1	409,091
USA	2	409,091
Honduras	3	346,154
Mexico	4	346,154
Panama	5	204,545
Jamaica	6	183,673

Interestingly, you'll note Costa Rica and the US are tied, while Mexico and Honduras are tied. At this point I don't think there's much question that the US and Costa Rica should hit the auto-qualify spots, the only question may be in what order do they do it.

The bigger race, of course, will be Honduras and Mexico. I think Mexico has the harder schedule, playing teams #1 and #2 away. Sooooo, if we wanted to make predictions, I'd go out and say that Costa Rica, the US, and Honduras auto-advance and Mexico wins up in the #4 spot playing (and probably beating) New Zealand.

The bigger pill, of course, is the falling of Mexico. Now, is a weak Mexico good for CONCACAF? Objectively, I'd argue no, we want a Federation full of strong teams and with 4 slots to potentially fill, I think Mexico has a much better chance of beating New Zealand than either Panamda or Jamaica. But as a USMNT? Let Mexico crash and burn. That's what a rivarly is.

He's a chart illustrating performance over the last 7 matches. Actually goes back a little further than that, including qualifying in past rounds and Gold Cup performances. Basically, this is rankings over the last 9 "ranking periods", covering a total of 13 games played.

 

 

And now the fun stuff. Tonight I think I want to see the US play tight, compact, and defensive. We don't need a win here, and with injuries and suspensions I don't want to see us playing risky. We'll be in our own house and should be able to dictate the game somewhat. Mexico is the one who needs to come in and get a result. I'm always weary of teams who recently fire their coaches, as they seem to have a great first "prove yourself" match afterwards (see Columbus v Houston for a great recent example).

 

Mexico is a dangerous team and their lack of results I think has been more teams coming and taking a cuatious approach at Azteca rather then actual poor performance. The US was hammered while away in Mexico and, honestly, a bit lucky to escape with a point. Turn that draw into a Mexico win and I bet the Hex looks a whole lot different today. 10 games isn't a lot.

 

So, yes, I'm advocating we get back to "Bruce-ball" or "Bradley-ba;;", stay tight and compact in the middle, keep numbers behind the ball, and pick moments for a fast counter against a Mexico team that's really going to need to come in and play open. Heat could be a factor as well. A second half couner running at tired Mexican legs could well be the winner.

 

My prediction?

 

A gritty 1-1 draw, which will almost be enough to get the US auto-in.

 

Isntant-Classico? I doubt it. But these games are always fun.



[Clever_Title]

Numbers shaking out well this week, with the possible exception of New York. Impossible team to figure out, seems like they're playing well and then lose to Columbus, draw with Philly, lose to Chivas, then bounce right back with some wins. Still sandwhiched between New England and Chicago, but those two teams are trending down and NY is, once more, on the rise, so who knows what'll happen against Toronto next week. Kansas City back to winning ways, Colorado stops their slide and Seattle and Montreal jumping up the table. Click to embiggen.

We're baaa-aaack

Huh. Long hiatus. There's actually an explanation for that one, and it doesn't involve a new kid. Not really. My work had been languishing on IE7, and I generally try to knock out entries around my lunch break. Google seemed to have updated their Blogger interface and it no longer worked for the Enterprise IE7 I was on, so I kept on posting to Big Soccer, but let this blog languish. I'm gonna try to pick it up again in the near future.

Anyway, like I said, I've been mostly keeping up with Power Rankings. Player ratings, less so. Power Rankings have been crazy though. The league has been so tight and there's been so many twists and turns that the new mashup system I started using has been a little wild. I may have mentioned it before, but I think I'm going to weight recent results less next season, simply because there's so much variability, though on the flip side, a few unpredictable weeks have the league sort of turned around anyway, so who knows?

I did change the format somewhat to a more "explanatory" (is that a word) table, showing the season rank and the rank over the last 5, the average of which is the ultimate rank. I also added a snapshot column, showing their most recent form and a Form column, showing whether they're trending up relative to their current ranking position or down. So here's the table for Week 28. Click to embiggen.

Bottom five teams can all probably be written off at this point of the season and Vancouver needs to turn things around to avoid joining them, but other than that, the league is wide open right now. It's going to be a great finish to the season methinks.

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.

M^3 (May Man of the Month)

I debated whether or not I wanted to do this now or after the USOC match tonight, but I think I'll drop it now and not consider the USOC match since there's generally no stats to cull from it and at this stage it might get a little lopsided. Plus lots of guys are out on international duty and such and it may not be fair.

Here's the inter-team player ratings for May. Note that this isn't baselined against other players or other teams, just how much each poayer played in May and what their contributions were (statistically speaking). So a guy rated below five wasn't neccessarily bad, just had below average contribution to team success this month.

With that said, here we go.

Ike Opara nearly steals it from Zusi, but Graham comes out on top, playing in 427 minutes and notching a goal and two assists and generally playing exceptionally well, earning an unsuurprising callup for the USMNT. Congrats, Graham. I really need to get a better photo...

Lucky Week 13?

So not a lot of movement in this weeks rankings, which may be a good thing. I like it when teams settle down and trends get less violent. Of course that doesn't mean there wasn't plenty of action happening. Portland making some noise, a reality check for Seattle, Chivas has, perhaps, bottomed out, and Kansas City very luckily manages to creep up a notch to #6.

Here's the full table.

And now the handy graphy-graph. Dallas on top once more, but Portland has very nearly caught them... Click to embiggen.

Croque-monsieur, anyone?

I'm not crazy about most french food, but man do they make good sandwhichs. Good defenders too, apparantly. Does anyone want to argue that Collin wasn't the best player for the month of April? Probably. There's always gonna be an argument for Zusi, but Collin's game winning goal and clean sheet in New York, and another clean sheet against DC more or less sealed it.

Here's how player ratings for April looked. Lots of defenders in there. Two clean sheets and a 1.25 GGA is none too shabby. Zusi sneaking in there as well, and was great to see Chance finally score (twice!), even if the goals were ultimatly for naught...

So raise a glass of wine for the Frenchman. I've gotta think he'll be another MLS All-Star this season, and with the game in Kansas City, that's sure to be awesome.

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...

Timmmbbbbeerrrrrrr

So... how bout them Timbers eh? Who'd've thunk they'd be carving out an identity as a road team? And why do I have to be the asshole who says it...

THE TIMBERS WOULD BE A BETTER TEAM IF THEY PLAYED ON A BIGGER FIELD.

Seriously, they look really good when they have space to work in. Jeld-Wenn doesn't suit their style. It's just not that great of a stadium. there. I said it.

Anway, was a poor game all around, actually. My wife (8 months pregnant) twisted her ankle, so we decided to leave early so we could get her home to ice it (and avoid all the traffic getting out of the lot). And by early, I mean I literally went to get the car at the opening kick and missed Chance Myers first MLS goal. Which is funny, because I was totally talking to one of the trainers on the flight home from New York about Chance and asked whether he thought he'd ever score. He laughed and sort of shrugged, saying Chance lit up the Reserve League back in the day with goals in almost every game, but just didn't seem like he'd ever score in an MLS game. And then, yeah. One minute in. Was hillarious. Did I post about that in my New York post? No? DAMMIT! Okay, I should have.

Anyway, yeah, I was really glad to see Chance score, and one would think that scoring early would mean te game would be a done deal. Forcing visitors to chase a game that early, for that long, seems like it would be perfect for SKCs style, and yet, somehow, defending just fell apart. I actually Jimmy had a really poor game in the nets, and the lack of run-of-play goals worries me some...

Still, early in the season, and it's hard to say Portland is a poor team this year, so... let's see the numbers.

No real surprise seeing Chance Myers as man of the match, unless you count a player from the losing team (not to mention a defender whose back line leaked three goals) as a surprise...

Wanna see some pictures? Suuuure you do.

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.

Tis a funny game

You know, this was the second home game this year that was really far from enjoyable, except this time we actually got a good result from it. It's an odd game like that. One goal can totally skew one's perspective. I imagine had DC held us to a 0-0 draw their fans would be thrilled. A few seconds of lapse and it's time for Ben Olsen's head.

I'm not saying any veiw is right or wrong. I'm just saying.

I'm also saying this is one time when I actually disagree more than usual with my ratings system. I thought Aurelien Collin had a pretty poor game, both defensively and in distribution, but aparantly the people over at the MLS Fantasy game disagree, because he apparently had some excellent defensive work with no mistakes...

Any way, here's the player ratings. Soony may seem low but it's important to remember that playing time actually is a facotr, so notching an above average rating while only playing seven minutes is pretty exceptional.

You can see SKC had the edge in overall average rating, and I think that showed. Unlike Chicago, DC actually seemed to come to play, and a little more quality from Pajoy could have made it a very different game. How bout that Beiler though, huh? Acquisition of the season at this point, surely...

But, yeah, Collin with Man of the Match. Not sure I'd give it to him objectively, but who am I to argue with numbers?

So, how bout them gnats?

Well, I never thought I'd live to see that... okay, that's not true. I thought someday I'd see the US get another result from Azteca. I was around in 1997, but I wasn't really following soccer much, despite playing in high school. Well, riding the bench in higschool. Shut up.

Anyway, I'm not shocked that the US got a point from Mexico, but I am really, really glad it happened.

I won't go into a lot of detail here, but Dan Loney, love him or hate him, nailed it, I think.

http://www.bigsoccer.com/soccer/dan-loney/2013/03/27/stolen-one-point-last-seen-fleeing-mexico-city/

In the mean time, I decided this would be a good time to actually dig a little bit into stats. Awesomely, MLSsoccer.com provided the Opta stats and chalkboard for this match, so I crunched the numbers to come up with ratings, much the same way I've been doing for SKC. Here's what the performances for each team looked like.

Maybe a little surprising to see Cameron ranked higher than Besler, but other than that, I think the ratings play out well. Great game from Gonzalez and maybe, just maybe, new CB pairing for the US has been found. Mexico with the slight edge ratings wise, which should be expected. In all honesty, they really took it to the US and were unlucky not to get the Edu penalty call (I think the Bradley "push" in the first 10 minutes was the correct non-call, hand checking a runner off the ball who goes down easy shouldn't be a PK that early in the match).

And still, a point from Azteca, while rare, shoudln't be cause for full blown celebration. This isn't the prize. The US is still only sitting on 4 points from 3 games, with 7 to go. I've seen 16 as the magic number, which would mean the US needs 4 wins from 7 games. With 5 at home, that's gotta be seen as doable, but at this pace the US is looking at aboiut 13-14 projected points. The next home match is going to be big. Bigger than this all told.

However, the best part about beating (edit - well, drawing... okay, now I've fallen into the "US beats Mexico 0-0" trap...) Mexico, in Mexico, is it takes away another home game of theirs and now might force them to get some road results, something very hard to do in CONCACAF.

I've been very skeptical/critical of Klinsman, but every time I'm ready to write me off, he pulls me back in. I really hope he proves me wrong this cycle.

Roll on, Oblivion

Okay, ratings starting to come together again. Still a group of teams lagging a bit at 3 games, which is throwing off the comparison somewhat, but I think it's starting to gel nicely. Columbus may feel a little hard done actually losing points even though they won, but no ranking drop, and its hard to argue the other teams don't belong up there as well.

Full table. Click to embiggen.

LA still flying high and Montreal is making their case. Chicago stuck down in the basement, and look at little Chivas go. GO CHIVAS, GO!

Seattle and New York still with plenty of time to figure it out, but definitely not how they wanted to start the season. And who thought Philly would get it together after their three goal first half meltdown against SKC?

Edit - And, what the hell, never too early in the season for a graph, right? As always, click for pops.

SHFR trends for the first four week. Note that the y axis is a log. LA's high rating makes a linear chart hard to read. Should clear up in a few weeks once LA levels out a bit (assuming they lose a game or two...).

Shots shots shots shotsshotsshots

I thought I had posted about this last season, and maybe I had, but it came up again after last night's game, so I thought I'd formalize it here, if only so that I could reference it later instead of having to dig up last years spreadsheet.

Just how bad is SKCs shots:shots on goal and shots on goal:goal percentage? Fairly bad.

Kansas City was second worst in the league in finishing last year, with a shots:SOG ratio of 29.15%, and a SOG:Goals ratio of 26.58%. This results in a shots:goals ratio of 7.75%. The only team worse than SKC was Chivas, and that is not good company to be in. Conversely, San Jose and New York lead the league at 13.9% and 14.4% respectively.

The league average was 10.25 goals scored for every 100 shots.

SKC lead the league in shots last year with 542. If they were just "average" i.e. scored on 10.25% of their shots instead of 7.75%, they would have scored an additional 13 goals last year... And I can think of 13 games where I could have taken an extra goal...

edit - Here's the full table. You'll notice Kei Kamara is included in this. His number is excluded from the league average. I was curious to see how he stacked up against SKC as a whole as well as to other teams in the league. Click to embiggen.

Backdrafting

A question came up on BigSoccer about how many players taken in the supplemntal draft wound up being signed for their team, which got me wanting to clear up something I had done when I started loking at the draft figures for 2012. Namely, who, from 2011, was still playing for their team in 2012, and how much playing time were they seeing?

From what I was able to track down, it looks like 25 out of 54 players saw action in 2012. The first 11 players taken saw significant playing time. Those guys were :

Omar Salgado
Darlington Nagbe
Perry Kitchen
Zarek Valentin
Zac MacMath
A. J. Soares
Kofi Sarkodie
Michael Nanchoff
Jalil Anibaba
C. J. Sapong
Will Bruin
After that it became kind of a crapshoot, with not a lot of correlation between position picked in 2011 and playing time from 2012. Here's what the graph looked like.

For those players who saw playing time, the average amount of minutes played was 1,528, almost exactly a half season, but you can see from the graph this bounces around a bit. Some guys played a lot, and some guys played almost none.

Of course this doesnt take into accoun players who are "projects" and never anticipated to start immediatly, or players who left the league for greener pastures, or left due to injury, but it seems to make a bit of sense that picks #1 - 10 will tend to stick around while players taken later on will have a broader range of success.

Consistent Inconsitency

So I noticed one or two weird things creep into my spreadsheet when calculating rankings this round, and it's because of the way the formula does the fading averaging over five games when five games have not yet been played. In this sense, Houston, having only won one game, cruises a little unfairly on that, while on the other end Seattle's single loss has then unfairly punished as they're behind even Colorado, who have lost two. I won't get into details, but rest assured, this should be sorted out once every team is at five games. Well, maybe a little detail. Basically, the normal rating formula is calculated using 1A + 0.4B + 0.3C + 0.2D + 0.1E. With only one game played, Seattle has 1 loss/1 game played = 1. With two games played, Colorado has 1 + 0.4 = 1.4 losses / 2 games played = 0.7. So Seattles one loss looks bigger than Colorado's 2 losses. It's not presented here, but Seattles calculated rating is -0.333 while Colorado's is 0.231, which is -0.333 * 0.7. Note that it works out like this only because all the losses have been by one goal...

At any rate, here's how the tables look this iteration

LA still at the top, Candian teams climbing, with Seattle and Chicago in the basement. Too early to tell anything, obviously, but it's shaping up to be a wild March I think.

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.

MLS : More like Germany, less like England?

So awhile ago I did a look at the season over season correlation in MLS and the PRemiership and found that there's much less correlation in MLS than there is in England. i.e. Good teams in the Premiership tend to stay good, and bad teams tend to stay bad, and there's not much surprise in where teams are going to end up. Conversely, in MLS, each season tends to be a new season and it's much harder to predict where a team will finish based on how they performed last season. I thought maybe that I should take a look at some of the other leagues and ee how they stood up and the first one I looked at was the Bundesliga. I was a little surprised to see that there's actually less correlation in the Bundesliga than there is in MLS. The highest correlation there was in the 2008-2009 season, with an R value of 0.65, but the last two seasons have been highly variable, with correlation values of 0.08. The average correlation over 5 seasons was 0.30 while the R^2 value was 0.087, lower than even MLS.

In looking at the numbers, this actually seems to have been an artifact of typically dominant teams like Schalke, Stuttgary, Weder Bremen and Wolfsburg all doing poorly in 2010-2011 and then doing well again in 2011-2012. I'm not sure there's that much to read out of it and sort of wonder if looking at a wider set of data would come to a different result, but I do think now that the German system seems to foster more pairty than the English system and seems to be comparable to MLS, while still able to create competetive teams that do well in European competition.

Here's the chart.

Some day I'll do a good side by side comparison of each of the worlds major leagues, but for now, it seems like MLS is trending more like the Bundesliga than the Premiership in terms of team parity, and I think that's a good thing.