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- WFTDA Releases Rankings; Angel City Surges
- Terminal Shorts Silicon, 200-162
- Deep Valley Downs Southern Discomfort, 208-159
- Sin City Torments Arizona, 211-130
- #23 Wasatch Seasons #20 Sacred, 214-148
- Preview: Spring Roll
- Preview: The Big O
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There are no live events on the schedule. Stay tuned!
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Not so much the old country for Lex, who's based in London. We travel far less than we used to, in no small part because we've worked very hard to build local coverage skills globally rather than incurring the costs of travelling ourselves.
Much of Dust Devil is archived here. We're aiming to upload local recordings to Youtube in the not-too-distant future, at no cost to you... but we're aiming to do a lot of things. Bear with us, please.
Wow, you get to go to the old country. Good for you.
How about spending some time putting up the video for the Dust Devil 2013 from weeks ago. That would be good for U.S.
Thanks.
You know what I think my main problem is? I don't get to watch as much derby as you guys do.
Yeah, three heads are definitely better than two for these types of decisions. I'm sure y'all have had some interesting private discussions over the past year without a proper tiebreaker. :)
Y'all should conduct "interviews" by asking several trusted people to submit their proposed top 25 each month, along with an explanation, to see if they are in the ballpark or on another planet.
Yes we were a little short this weekend. However Houston is looking amazing and I see them moving up as we see them play higher ranked teams.
I meant to include that in this post. By the middle of last year, Gnosis' time constraints had pressed him out of the Power Rankings process, so the panel was Justice and me for much of 2012. This year, Lex Talionis has replaced Justice on the panel. We definitely feel like three people is the right number, so we're giving some consideration to inviting a new panel member. If we do so, we'll mention it in the intro article for the first ranking cycle they participate in.
Prior to this weekend, Houston's other recent results were hard to contextualize. Much more clear now (though I'm also curious to investigate whether Duke City took a short lineup to this event).
Our judgment to date has also been shaped by their performance in last year's playoffs, in which they struggled pretty severely over teams they were favored to beat. Clearly, they're demonstrating the incorrectness of that judgment (and helping us see No Coast's results in a new light in the bargain).
Teams aren't static entities. Gauging their future competitive prospects is, essentially, trying to predict a moving target. In some cases, such as Angel City, a deep dig at their recent results, as well as recent results of their opponents and their opponents' opponents, starts to suggest that the team in question is getting better every game.
It's a more complicated analytical approach than simple triangulation, and it produces rankings that are sometimes counterintuitive at first blush, but we've found our judgment about "team trajectory" to be an important element in successful predictions. And, it cuts both ways... sometimes the trajectory becomes very clearly downward rather than upward.
The counterintuitive movement you're seeing is a direct symptom of derby's current "make your own schedule" approach. If derby adopted meaningful divisioning with balanced schedules within divisions/conferences (balanced schedule = each team plays every other team in their competitive grouping during a season), a simple comparison of W-L records would suffice.
That's just far from the case today, and that's why DNN Power Rankings continue to be based on a simple question: if these two teams play tomorrow, which one do we think will win?
I guess I was a little ambitious in my comparing of teams. Yes you're right. There are clear hierarchies in roller derby. I guess my point was it's all arbitrary, teams always over and under achieve which is the reasoning win loss records are used in sports power rankings when comparing two similar teams, and I've just never seen a team win and drop in standings and a team lose and go up. It's strange to me.
And a view you are totally entitled to.
Last month the rankings agreed with you; having seen both teams in action this year, they no longer do.
Would love to see that match-up, though. Would be one hell of a bout.
Someday, I'm told, this will work.
The main issue is that leagues pick their own games, as opposed to a season where teams play a variety of teams. Also, 2-25 are not remotely close. The difference in point spreads is hundreds of points. Peruse the DNN scores page and that becomes plainly obvious. A win is completely meaningless when a good team plays one that is not good. It's just as meaningless when two not good teams teams play each other.
DNN power rankings have an 80 percent track record of successfully predicting who will win a game, and that's a lot better accuracy than you'd get by ranking teams other than Gotham by wins only.
DO YOU JUST HATE NORTH CENTRAL TEAMS!!!!!!!!! That's probably what it is. North central racists.
Faq have been read. Is there really much of a difference between power rankings and a league table? I guess I'm using major sports to determine rankings. Say in college basketball, if major conference team A is 2-2 and major conference team B is 4-0, team B is ranked higher in any sort of list made, even if team A lost their 2 games close and team B only squeaked out a couple victories. I guess that's my problem. I'm using my common sense and not thinking about they way DNN would rank things. I guess also when thinking on if rose city played windy city on a neutral track who would win a best of series, I think windy takes it. I just think they're the better team.
...is a league table.
This is not a league table.
This is Power Rankings; Outrage is understandable and expected. There's a link at the top to the FAQ you might care to peruse so that it can be appropriately directed.
Still doesn't explain how a team can lose two bouts, and move ahead of a team that won two bouts. I get the "level"* of team lost to/beat, but a win is a win. Teams are constantly over and under achieving just about every bout. So just because rose barely lost to bad and windy barely beat some lower ranked teams, doesn't mean a lot in sports. A win is a win and a loss is a loss.
*Level is a relative term. Top 25 is to 25. After Gotham, most of the teams ranked 2-25 aren't all that far apart in terms of talent.
Added it to the page. You, sir, rock.
I just finished uploading the video of this bout.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UAj21eid_w
yah yah.
mayor wasn't called on a low block after all. :)
That one is *definitely* on the radar.
A significant part of the reason Rose had dropped as low as they had was because of the massive question over their jammer rotation.
They showed last year that without White Flight and Soulfearic playing, they were a much, much weaker team.
The addition of Licker*N*Split to their rotation, and specifically how she stood up against Bay Area, served to answer that question, and lift them back up towards Bay Area.
So what's the argument against dropping Bay Area down to Rose's rank from that result? Then Angel wouldn't have also risen as high, and the discrepancy between Angel-Charm and Angel-Rose would've been less.
Has DNN abandoned the "Who would beat whom" metric in favor of a "What would sort of fit but have the least movement" metric"?
The only useful data point BAD has this year is the fact that they beat Sacred by about 100 points more than Angel City did in March. But that only tells us that BAD should be ranked several spots above Angel. It doesn't say anything about where they should be ranked relative to other teams. However, the BAD/Sacred score is very similar to their game last October, meaning neither team has shifted, at least relative to each other. But the Angel/Sacred game last September resulted in a 1pt win for Sacred, which lends evidence to the notion that Angel should move up instead of BAD moving down. It's a somewhat tenuous bit of data crunching, but there you go.
Anyway, the close Angel/Rat result means that these teams are possibly ranked correctly after you swap the Angel and Rat rankings. But that's a hindsight observation and not something the DNN guys were able to use for these rankings.