SoccerRatings

Wow, Albyn Jones' website already has SoccerRatings for the season. Although the website indicates the ratings are through September 6, they actually appear to include games through September 4 at the latest. The ratings are very early and therefore not based on a lot of data from this season, but they look pretty real. For those not familiar with SoccerRatings, they start with a seed of teams based on past history. Over the course of the season, the proportional impact of past history diminishes in favor of teams' records this year. However, some impact from past history remains throughout the season. Jones does this because he has found that it results in more accurate predictions of game results. Go to this webpage and click on Women: NCAA Division I: http://soccerratings.com/index.php?title=Main_Page The Pilots are #3 in these ratings.

UPSoccerFanatic - Didn't you say last season that Albyn Jones ratings were pretty darn accurate?

How do they compare with the NCAA's?

It's a little too early to compare the NCAA's RPI vs Albyn Jones' SoccerRatings. This is because the SoccerRatings include historic data whereas the RPI doesn't. Because of that, the RPI at this point becomes m0re useful each week but still is pretty random since there's so little data in the system. For example, Jones' Soccerratings after roughly the first three games of the season had UCLA at #1, whereas the RPI had St. Louis at #1. Clearly at this point, Jones' system is much close to reality. Jones' ratings will change over the course of the season as will the RPI ratings, but the RPI ratings will change much more dramatically. So, we need to wait a couple of weeks for the RPI ratings' data base to grow. At that point, we can do a comparison and try to see why there are differences.

FANatic wrote:UPSoccerFanatic - Didn't you say last season that Albyn Jones ratings were pretty darn accurate?

How do they compare with the NCAA's?

I think I noted that the Albyn Jones Java predictor has predicted the winner of every UP tournament game the last two years. I haven't checked before that, and I don't know if the predictor works in reverse, but it would be interesting to know how it did before that.


For the record, AJ also predicted that UCLA would beat UP this year, and that UP would beat USC. In both cases, however, the prediction was inside the error range.

Albyn also gave a strong prediction we would beat the other teams, and we did.