Philosophy

My goal in creating RAMS was to develop an understandable Retrodictive rating system based on three factors – Record, Average Margin, and Schedule. (A Retrodictive rating system is one that attempts to determine which team has done better in past games, as opposed to a Predictive system, which attempts to predict which team will do better in upcoming contests.)

RAMS calculates a Point Rating (PR) and a Winning Propensity (WP) for each team. Point Rating corresponds to Point Spread – a team with a PR of 10 would theoretically be considered a 2-point favorite over a team with a PR of 8. Winning Propensity corresponds to Odds – a team with a WP of 300 would theoretically be considered a 3:1 favorite over a team with a WP of 100. However, it should be stressed that RAMS is a Retrodictive rating system.  The Odds, Probabilities, or Point Spreads referenced in RAMS are merely reflections of past games.  They are not necessarily designed to accurately handicap upcoming contests.

RAMS includes games against non-member schools when calculating ratings, but unless a non-member school has played multiple member schools, the effect on the member school’s ranking is marginal.

Early Season Quirks

Early in the season, when a limited number of matchups have taken place, a few atypical results can affect the entire ranking.  Ratings after two games often look particularly bizarre, but by the fourth game, the dust typically settles, and the RAMS rankings more accurately reflect the teams’ true strength.      

To illustrate the quirky and volatile nature of early ratings, consider a hypothetical situation in which a 26-team football league is nearing the end of its second week.  In games so far in the season, A has defeated B by 7, B has defeated C by 7, C has defeated D by 7, and so forth down to Y beating Z by 7.  An upcoming game between teams A and Z will close out week 2.  If Vegas were to foolishly use RAMS as the sole basis for setting a point spread, it would set Team A as a 175-point favorite! However, if Team A were to lose to Team Z by 8 points or more, Team Z would move into the top-rated spot and would flip the entire ranking upside-down in the process!

If there are groups of teams that have not played anyone outside the group, RAMS uses Point Ratings from the previous season in order to establish a basis of comparison. Otherwise, RAMS ratings are based exclusively on current season results. Consequently, very little of the RAMS ratings reflect historical reputation. If Northern Illinois defeats Notre Dame in the first week of the football season, then Northern Illinois is considered the better team, at least at that point.

Record vs. Scoring Margin

I consider a team’s record to be more important than its scoring margin, and Winning Propensity reflects this priority.  The WP process will always rank a team with a 5 and 4 record ahead of a 4 and 5 team with an identical schedule, regardless of their respective scoring margins.  That being said, scoring margins play a prominent role early in the season  because they provide a level of precision that records alone do not.  As the season progresses, scoring margins have less and less of an impact.  

Winning Propensity is based on the concept that the weaker team wins at least part of the time. For the first week or two of a season, it’s fairly common for the team with the higher Point Rating to have won every game.  In that case, Winning Propensity cannot be calculated, so Point Rating serves as the only RAMS ranking.  Once a team with a low PR “upsets” a team with a higher PR, RAMS will begin using Winning Propensity as the primary ranking. The first WP ranking is usually very similar to the PR ranking due to the high correlation between Point Rating and winning. As the season progresses, the correlation diminishes and the differences between the PR and WP rankings become more pronounced.   

In order to discourage teams from running up the score, some rating systems set an arbitrary limit on the size of a scoring margin that they consider.  I did not feel an obligation to set such a limit in RAMS, since scoring margin plays such a small role in the WP ranking throughout most of the season.  Moreover, I have tried to avoid incorporating arbitrary limits into the RAMS process because I feel like doing so would make the rating itself rather arbitrary. My approach is simply to treat all scores equally and let the chips fall where they may.

Home Team Advantage

Home Team Advantage is a difficult factor to quantify. RAMS takes the simplest approach and ignores it. I feel it is more appropriate for a retrodictive rating system to focus on actual results rather than speculate on what might have occurred on a neutral court. While some college basketball studies estimate a home court advantage of around 4 points, I would contend that a team with a one-point home win should still be given more credit than the team it defeated. I see a home team adjustment as not only adding complexity, but also setting up the possibility that a losing team could be rewarded more than a winning team. If a team plays approximately the same number of home and away games, home advantage should pretty much cancel out anyway, at least theoretically.

Tournament Factor

RAMS does not distinguish between regular season games and tournament games when calculating Point Rating and Winning Propensity.  Consequently, the championship team is not always the top team in the WP rankings.  While having a good overall season is a worthy goal, most teams would prefer tournament success.  In order to better recognize top tournament teams, I have added the PC ranking.  PC stands for Playoff Consistent, but could also stand for Politically Correct if you’re of the mindset that a team’s success should be defined by its post-season accomplishments. While tournament success falls outside the original scope of RAMS factors, I feel that the PC ranking is a worthy addition to the RAMS system by recognizing deserving tournament teams.

After the completion of the playoffs, RAMS takes the WP ranking and makes the following adjustments to produce to PC ranking.  (Any tournament references do not apply to secondary tournaments such as the NIT.) 

Generally, an upset in the tournament causes the winning team to move up in the rankings and the losing team to move down by a comparable amount.  If a team is involved in multiple upsets, it complicates the situation, but the total winners’ gains and losers’ demotions still balance out in most cases.  One notable exception: if the winning team is a low-ranked automatic qualifier, RAMS awards the victorious underdog more than it penalizes the losing team. This exception gives a low-seeded team an extra boost for pulling a major upset, and it advances my belief that losing to an underdog in the tournament is still better than not qualifying for the tournament at all.