Here is a link to the latest Massey NCAA D-1 Soccer Ratings including all games through October the 8th. http://www.masseyratings.com/rate.php?lg=csoc The Top 20, 1 SMU 2 Maryland 3 West Virginia 4 Virginia 5 Wake Forest 6 UCLA 7 Brown 8 California 9 Duke 10 San Fransisco 11 Clemson 12 Lehigh 13 Old Dominion 14 Illinois Chicago 15 Santa Clara 16 Saint Louis 17 George Mason 18 Indiana 19 Connecticut 20 North Carolina I like all of the information provided with these ratings. The Massey Ratings shows W-L-T, gives an Overall Rating, shows a Power Rating, Offensive Rating, Defensive Rating and Strength of Schedule Rating. It also shows the changes up or down the table for each team. As an example Stanford made a giant leap in the Ratings climbing 43 spots from # 85 to # 43. Sweet!
The only problem with this methodology is that the standard deviation of (+/-)1.0 for the final rating(s) is absolutely huge, by comparison to those for soccerratings.com (which are actually given for each team, as +/- SE). It's sort of like saying the planet Earth is located somewhere between Saturn and Mercury, versus saying it can be found between Venus and Mars. Since the explanation of weighting factors is actually based on large scoring differentials (like football and basketball), the method apparently isn't sensitive enough to deal with the low score differentials of the type you see in soccer, which is why the uncertainities are so large. In actuality, any of their top 30 or so teams could be #1, while that uncertainity is reduced to about the top 10 teams in soccerratings.com. So, unlike soccertom, I don't like these ratings since there's far too much uncertainity built into the outcome for a low scoring sport like soccer.
Huh? My head hurts after reading that. I suspect that both Rating services have very similar results although I haven't checked as of yet. All I know is Massey appears to keep their ratings much more up to date and curent and presents their data in an easy to read format with much more information than Albion...
When soccerratings.com gets around to updating their ratings it will be interesting to compare. Another thing I don't like about Albion is the weighting from the previous years results.
But it doesn't mean much if the probability is that UConn could just as easily be #1 as #19, which is a pretty broad level of uncertainity. You could reverse the order starting with UNC as #1 and ending with SMU as #20, and it would still be descriptive of those team's relative performance. It's much tighter with Jones' system (soccerratings.com). Don't get caught up in the cosmetics or the ranking. Even Jones is quick to point out that the actual ranking is unimportant. It's the power rating with the standard deviation that describes a team's relative strength to another. As for your head, Advil works pretty well to reduce the swelling caused by a liberal arts education.
I just saw on the ncaa sports page that they have the D-I RPI ratings up. How does this play into the actual tournament selection.
Not sure, but does UVA play anywhere but at HOME!!! Thanks for pointing out the RPI...looks like San Fran has the best road record of the top 50. How does the home vs road play out come selection time?
Somebody needs to tell Massey that UC-Davis is a full-fledged Division I independent this year-- they should not be ranked among the Division II teams.