And now…ratings
by Ken Pomeroy on Thursday, November 3, 2011
The long-awaited pre-season ratings are here. There’s a write-up on the rating algorithm and some notable teams in College Basketball Prospectus, so you should check that out when it becomes available shortly. I’m not going to repeat that stuff here. Of course, you will get a lot of other great content in it as well.
One change this season involved the computation of the Pythagorean winning percentage. Calibration of last year’s predictions revealed that 10.25 is the best exponent to use for the purpose of the game probabilities. This should provide a more realistic forecast of end-of-season records now and especially as the games start and real data goes into the system. This does not affect the calculations of any other statistics.
Right now this results in a lot of conference records bunching up near .500. This will prompt your message board friends to say something like “There’s no way…