Since we last spoke, most everything about the 10% Ante ranking system is the same. With this said, we received some good feedback and we made some improvements. Three main issues were brought up when discussing 10% Ante and, while working on these issues, several more issues surfaced. These are Five Issues and the changes we made to resolve them.
- The 2018 Season should be Divorced from the 2017 Season – As a solution for this issue, the season will start with a pre-season ranking. And, as the season progresses, these teams, organically, will move. We will continue this Pre-Season Ranking System until Week Six. When we hit Week Six, the points for every team on Week Six will, retroactively, be their points for Week One through Week Five. i.e. We’re hopeful that we’ll have a relatively accurate ranking for the teams. (We speak more to the rankings in the last paragraph.) And, whether we do or do not create an accurate pre-season ranking, every team has six weeks to move their team from where they are to where they feel they should be.
- Teams should start with the Same Number of Points – As a solution for this issue, 10% Ante will have two tracks: Front-stage and Backstage. For all intents and purposes, people will not be aware that that there’s a second, backstage track. What will be visible to the teeming masses of lacrosse fans that will follow 10% Ante is every NCAA team starting with 1,000 points and, after each game, that every team either won their game and gained points, lost their game and lost points, and moved either up or down the rankings. For example, on our spreadsheet, before the first game of 2018, Air Force, Denver and Duke each had 1,000 points. After the Week One games, Air Force had 917, Denver had 1,062, and Duke had 1070. For the intellectually curious fans, they can learn how these points were formulated. But for the teaming masses who simply wait with bated breath to see the rise and fall of the NCAA teams, they can simply enjoy the show. (For the record, I believe that the backstage track is objective and fair.)
- Change in Points for Losing Team – The previous iteration of 10% Ante had a simple formula for when teams win and lose. The winning team received 10% of the losing teams points. This system is merit-based in that when Denver beats NJIT they only get 20 points but when Denver beats Albany, they earn 170 points. So to speak, what you kill is what you eat. And, when Denver wins, this makes complete sense. But when Denver loses, that Denver loses the same amount of points whether they lose to Albany or NJIT, that does not make sense. As a consequence, we’ve adjusted how much the losing team loses. The base loss is still 10%. But the losing team has points either or added to or subtracted from the 10% points. So if Denver loses to Albany they’ll lose less points than if they lost to NJIT. (Without this change, the rankings did not make sense. With this change, the rankings look great.)
- Better Spreadsheet – Previously, as we were still figuring out how this thing would work, making changes on the spreadsheet was arduous. Every change involved cell-by-cell changes and a decent amount effort. Currently, we still need to fill in some data but our spreadsheet is all but completed and entering and changing data is now a relatively simple process.
- Ranking the Teams – Though the points for every team will be retroactively changed to each team’s point total on Week Six (see Issue-Solution #1), for the first five weeks, we need a (temporary) ranking to work from. For teams one-to-sixteen, using the sixteen teams from the 2017 Final Four Tournament in the order they finished makes sense. For seventeen-through-seventy, we can use Massey’s Ratings, other ratings, or we could have people, like you, submit ratings and we can make a ranking based on the averages of these rankings.
And that’s it for now. To be continued…
