qycahakila's Aeonity Blog

Bears power
Date: Dec 4th, 2008 7:43:25 am - Subscribe
Mood: keen

This rankings week begins with a system that was featured on FoxSports.com two years ago, but faded from that site and so from this feature. But they're back, courtesy alert reader Scott Green.

It's the DVOA ratings, a statistics-based ranking that takes into account many, many more factors than the SportsDirect system, which admits it doesn't consider home-field advantage or weather because they're "non-statistical" factors. Seems to me, as a math major, that one could rank home fields as advantageous or not if one were so inclined. And as for weather, aren't things like temperature, percent humidity and precipitation pretty straightforward statistics?

The folks at the DVOA ratings are so inclined to put this stuff together, and they seem to have a pretty elaborate system. Certainly more elaborate than the "one guy who likely did not watch all 16 NFL games in their entirety over the weekend putting teams in order based on his idea of who's good or not" method that most other sites employ. At least Will Leitch makes it entertaining on Deadspin.

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