Seems clear Stanford is the best team of the last decade. Right ? Then Florida state? Who is third? Or other thoughts on #1 and #2? This would be the first decade where any debate is possible about #1, but seems like with 3 titles and a runner up that Stanford is the best. Or maybe there are better metrics than just college cup performance .
I can't do the 2010-2019 decade, but how about this as a Top 15 for 2007-2019 (13 years), based on average Massey regular season ranks (rounded off). It's a pretty good list: Stanford 3 North Carolina 4 Florida State 7 Virginia 8 UCLA 9 Penn State 14 Florida 15 Texas A&M 15 West Virginia 17 Duke 18 BYU 21 Southern California 21 Notre Dame 22 South Carolina 23 Santa Clara 24
Right, teams of the decade. Again, average Massey regular season rankings, but this time for 2010-2019. Taking NCAA Tournament results into consideration would change the order some, but not a lot: Stanford 3 North Carolina 5 Virginia 6 Florida State 7 UCLA 11 Penn State 14 Texas A&M 15 West Virginia 15 Duke 16 Florida 17 Santa Clara 18 South Carolina 21 BYU 22 Southern California 25 Notre Dame 26 The biggest changes from using the last 13 years, rather than 10, are that Notre Dame dropped down and Santa Clara moved up. There are couple of other relatively minor changes. By and large, this comes close to the "right" group for the top 15, but in a few cases not in the right order based on NCAA Tournament results.
This is why relying on Massey that only considers regular season, is flawed. So no Georgetown? You can't be in the hunt for the biggest prize in post season play for wcsoc multiple times, in addition to conference championships, in the past decade and not be in consideration. Post season is what matters the most. This is the flaw in Massey. It needs to be all inclusive. Most rank greatest teams in pro sports not in regular season records (unless you are the Dolphins. Yes Coach Shula well done. ). But in reality no one even remembers what happened in regular season when you think about the all time team greats in most other sports. Maybe a game here or there but that is it. The league or conf wins and post season is what is discussed.
It is mind blowing that Massey does not consider post season in anything. I would think Georgetown should be in this list too. In any other sport when you rank the greatest it is based only on final finishes and postseason play. Regular season is never considered unless a record is set.
Sorry about the double post. My tablet reset and it came back to me as connection lost and not posted.
Massey does post-NCAA tournament rankings, but I don't, so I use Massey's final regular season rankings. The reason I limit myself to regular season rankings is that my work is intended as a resource for coaches to help them with scheduling and analyzing their prospects for NCAA tournament seeds and at large selections. Seeds and at large selections are based strictly on the regular season and do not take any prior year results -- including NCAA Tournament results -- into consideration. The limitation to the regular season is something I always mention. I like Georgetown, and they've had 2 very good years in the last decade, both at #6 for Massey. Of the other 8 years, their best rank is #27. Princeton had 1 very good year. Portland had 2, one at #3 and one at #8. And so on. I guess a question is, How do you define a "best team of the decade"? I look for consistency at the highest level. Some look for 1 or 2 excellent results. There's no right or wrong about it, it's just a matter of what you mean by the term.
Totally with CPT here. With my UVA hat on, they lost 2 games this year. Both to Final 4 teams. UNC in OT in what was essentially a home game for UNC and WSU when impacted by key injuries and absences at home. To me, that is a fantastic season and should count as one. I dont think the post season should count for any more, but thats me.
That would be good. Then, we'd have best in regular season and best in NCAA Tournament. With those, the question would be how to weight the two of them to come up with an overall rank.
If I get a break from other stuff, I'm thinking I'll try it, just for fun -- and to see how the list differs from the list based on Massey rankings. I've got all the draw sheets. It will be a while!
I am guessing that if what we are really interested in is the correct top 5 that limited scoring teams by hand to the top 10 in your other rankings would be expected to the same top 5 as if you scored more teams. Where can you access completed draw sheet?
Use this Wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCAA_Division_I_Women's_Soccer_Championship Down on the page, there's a table by year. For each year, there's a Details link. Click on it and it will take you to a page for that year. On that page, there should be a bracket.
I started this https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13zQYl6st5OpFRWnyHZPIXtPwugReEbXqiWyA2eBMBXc/edit?usp=sharing I think I have all the teams that Cpthomas has in his 2010-2019 Massey. Then making a college cup earrns a team a line in the spreadsheet. I am using a 6-5-4-3-2-1 for how far a team goes. So far, I have just done the college cup results. Anyone want to start filling in other rounds? It would also be nice if it were possible to vary the number of points per round without redoing it. 35 Stanford 29 FSU 20 UNC 15 UCLA 6 Southern Cal 11 Penn state 14 Duke 9 UVa 0 Santa Clara 0 Penn State 4 TAMU 5 WVU 0 Florida 6 Notred Dame 4 South Carolina 0 BYU 4 Washington State 8 Georgetown 4 Rutgers 4 Va Tech 4 Wake Forest 4 Boston College 4 Ohio State
It seems like no matter how you slice it, the top three are Stanford, FSU, and UNC. I think what Stanford did last decade with all of the great teams there are now is extremely impressive. FSU, too, but Stanford is a notch above for decade long performance, basically making the College Cup almost every year. How about best single team of the decade ? (Team and year) Stanford 2019 is in the conversation. I don’t think a strong case can be made for any UNC team. I think UNC’s best team May have actually been 2013 , but injuries got the best of them at the end.
I'm taking a break from the tedious grind of updating all of my stats and stuff, so this is a fun diversion. I've set up a system in Excel to do NCAA tournaments for the decade -- I'm far more fluent in Excel than in Google Spreadsheets. At this point, I've revised the scoring system a little because I want to give teams credit for getting into the tournament, even though it has the side effect of giving points to the automatic quaifiers from low end conferences. I figure they'll drop down on the list and can be disregarded once the standings are complete. So, I'm using this scoring system: Appearing in round 1 - 1 point Appearing in round 2 - 2 points Appearing in round 3 - 3 points Appearing in quarterfinals - 4 points Appearing in semifinals - 5 points Appearing in championship - 6 points Champion 7 points These are cumulative, i.e., a team that loses in round 2 gets 3 points, 1 for playing in round 1 plus 2 for playing in round 2. The champion gets a total of 28 points. I have one refinement to the above, which is that if a game goes to PKs, the team that does not advance gets credit, nevertheless, for getting to the next round. This is on the basis that, since the objective is to rank teams, the teams essentially were equal notwithstanding that one advanced and the other didn't. This is debatable, but that's what I've decided to do for now. I've set up the program so I can change the scoring system relatively easily. (But, I don't like changing scoring systems after the fact because someone doesn't like the results.) In going through the brackets, I can see a couple of things that can distort whatever the results will be. One is that the tournament, to some extent, is overtly "fixed." This is due to home field advantage and seeding -- the teams playing at home have an advantage and the better the seed, the easier the road forward. The second is that the geograpic pairing of teams can make some teams appear weaker than they really are in a system based on how far a team advances. An easy example of this is Santa Clara in the three years I've done so far: they played and lost relatively early to #1 seed Stanford in each of 2010, 2011, and 2012. Who knows how far they could have gone in those years with different draws? But, it's fun, and when I'm done, who knows what the "standings" will be?
Here is what I had, above, based on average Massey regular season rankings for the decade: 1. Stanford 3 2. North Carolina 5 3. Virginia 6 4. Florida State 7 5. UCLA 11 6. Penn State 14 7. Texas A&M 15 8. West Virginia 15 9. Duke 16 10. Florida 17 11. Santa Clara 18 12. South Carolina 21 13. BYU 22 14. Southern California 25 15. Notre Dame 26 Here is what I get for the top 51 based on NCAA tournament performance, using the scoring system in the preceding post. In parentheses are the rankings based on Massey regular season: 1. Stanford 174 (1) 2. FloridaState 151 (4) 3. NorthCarolinaU 133 (2) 4. UCLA 121 (5) 5. Duke 108 (9) 6. VirginiaU 100 (3) 6. PennState 100 (6) 8. NotreDame 66 (15) 8. SouthernCalifornia 66 (14) 10. TexasA&M 64 (7) 11. WestVirginiaU 63 (8) 12. SouthCarolinaU 58 (12) 13. FloridaU 56 (10) 13. Georgetown 56 (not in top 15 regular season list) 15. SantaClara 50 (11) 16. VirginiaTech 39 (not in top 15 regular season list) 17. BYU 37 (13) 18. BostonCollege 36 18. OhioState 36 18. WakeForest 36 21. Rutgers 35 21. WashingtonState 35 23. Baylor 33 24. Auburn 30 24. MichiganU 30 26. OklahomaState 29 27. TexasTech 28 27. WisconsinU 28 29. UCF 27 30. ArkansasU 26 31. Clemson 25 32. NCState 24 33. WashingtonU 21 34. CaliforniaU 20 35. Marquette 18 35. TennesseeU 18 35. ColoradoU 18 35. ArizonaU 18 39. Princeton 17 39. MississippiU 17 39. Pepperdine 17 39. SouthFlorida 17 43. MinnesotaU 16 44. KentuckyU 15 44. MarylandU 15 44. PortlandU 15 44. LongBeachState 15 48. NorthwesternU 14 48. BostonU 14 48. Hofstra 14 48. KansasU 14